


Hereafter

by varlovian



Series: Hereafter [1]
Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Angst, Canon Temporary Character Death, Dreamsharing, Grief/Mourning, Hopeful Ending, Implied Sexual Content, Implied/Referenced Torture, Kidnapping, M/M, Major Character Injury, Partially Blind!76, Post-Fall of Overwatch, Resolved Sexual Tension, Reunions, Slow Burn, Soul Bond, Soulmate-Identifying Marks
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-02
Updated: 2017-02-03
Packaged: 2018-09-12 15:35:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 6
Words: 58,930
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9078910
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/varlovian/pseuds/varlovian
Summary: The reality of the situation doesn’t set in until early next morning, staring at himself in the mirror, head as steam-touched as the room around him. His eyes find his soul-mark in the reflection, the man’s mask immortalized on his skin in bold strokes of jet-black ink, dark and permanent. Like a shadow.
    
  
The explosion at Overwatch HQ forges a soul-bond between Jack and Gabriel, only for them to wake in a world where neither knows the other survived. Wounded and disgraced, Jack Morrison disappears in pursuit of those responsible, haunted by a dead man’s last words. Years later, Reaper pins down the elusive Soldier: 76, and all is revealed.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Hereafter is my second submission to the 2016 Overwatch Big Bang project. I'm running solo on this one as my partner had other commitments, but expect a playlist and some art of my own very soon!
> 
> Some notes:
> 
> • This story will update every Monday until it is fully posted. It is not a WIP. All six parts have been written in their entirety, I just need to give them the once-over for continuity, spelling and grammar errors.  
> • This is very slightly canon divergent, in that soulmate-identifying marks exist and are known. Everything else within canon remains the same, and it actually doesn't have much of an impact on the story apart from Jack and Gabriel's bond. There's a distinct lack of world-building on my part, and for that I apologize. I chalk it up to assumed knowledge and the privacy of soul-marks—at least in this 'verse.  
> • Chapter titles are from the song _Signal to Noise_ by Peter Gabriel;  &  
> • Quotes at the start of each chapter are from the song _Windswept_ by Crywolf.

# i: sound & sight

*

 _I'll be what you need,_  
_I'll keep you inside my fortress_  
_Hand you the keys,_  
_Leave you to roam these halls._  
  
_But you tore down the keep,_  
_I returned to find ruins_  
_You left all my love_  
_In the rubble with these walls…_

*

For Jack, the fight is a double-exposed image, equal parts cold detachment and raw, unbridled hurt.

The dual emotions leave him unbalanced and immediately on the defensive. He loses what little advantage he has minutes into the fight and is pinned, head hitting the wall with a resounding _thwack._ Black spots bloom across his vision. He shakes them off just in time to block the next attack, hands closing in a vice-grip around his assailant's wrists, blocking the path of a knife meant for his throat.

His next breath in is a sharp, wounded thing. His eyes fix on the knife, but he forces himself to look up.

Into the face of the man trying to kill him.

It _hurts_. God, does it hurt. Jack didn’t think that anything could hurt this much, but he was wrong. His world is crashing down around him, everything he worked so hard to build crushed under the boot of a man he’d looked up to. A man he thought he could count on.

How blind he was.

How blind he still _is_ , letting himself be baited into this trap while the rest of his team are off fighting the insurgents. He’s _better than this_ , he is, but Reyes knows exactly which buttons to push to get a response out of him. Knows them like the back of his hand, a hand tight around the hilt of a wicked-looking dagger, intended for Jack's throat, and that’s the crux of it right there because Gabriel is trying to _kill him_ and Jack—

Jack doesn’t want this. He never has.

“It's just you and me now, Jack,” Gabriel taunts, sinking his entire weight into his hands, “and you know how this ends. We both do."

He wants to scream. At Gabriel, at himself, at anyone implicit in the events leading up to this moment. He wants to, but the words just won’t come out. What do you say to someone so far gone they'd kill their friends in cold blood?

It doesn't matter that they themselves aren't friends anymore. The distance does nothing to reconcile the man he knew with the dead-eyed gaze and utter brutality of the stranger before him. That pain still cuts deep; it still leaves scars. Ones that may never heal.

"Please don't do this," Jack begs, struggling against his own labored breathing.

Gabriel's face grows darker. Angrier. He hisses, "Overwatch had its chance. No more. I won't stop, not until this is done."

"I know," Jack says, wearily. A strange calm washes over him; he knows what he has to do.

Jack finds the last shred of courage within, seizes it—

—and  _lowers his arms_.

Shock plays on Gabriel's face in the moments before it is eclipsed by rage. He surges forward, pressing his forearm against Jack's throat, forcing him back against the wall, hard.

“What the _fuck_ are you playing at?” he seethes in a low, dangerous tone.

The pressure against his throat whittles his air supply down to mere vapors, but Jack doesn’t fight him, even when the dizziness hits and he begins to see stars. Jack slurs a heady, “ _Gabe…”_ and a light appears in the other man’s eyes that may be nothing at all—it might be a reflection or a shadow—but it might also be indecision. And that’s enough for him.

It’s enough.

As darkness curls at the edges of his vision, Jack reaches out and grasps Gabriel’s forearm, fixing him with a watery-eyed stare. “It’s all right.”

The next thing he knows, the pressure on his windpipe is gone and he’s sliding down the length of the wall, swallowing huge breaths of tepid air, his body slack with exhaustion. He rubs at the ache in his neck, at bruises that are bound to appear tomorrow. He feels weak, disorientated.

“God _DAMN IT!_ ”

Gabriel kicks a storage pallet across the floor, wood crunching under the sole of his heavy boot. His eyes, when they meet Jack’s, are furious. Tension is stamped into every line and plane of his body, muscles straining as his large hands curl into fists by his side. He seems to come to some sort of decision. In one smooth motion, he pulls a pistol from his thigh holster, flicks off the safety and levels it under his own chin.

Jack is on his feet in an instant. Before he even knows what he’s doing he’s up close and personal in the other man's space, hands around those long fingers, pushing the weapon back. Gabriel gives him a warning look, but the heat in his eyes is stolen by the urgency in Jack’s, the helpless pain that bleeds into his features like an open wound.

He’s barely holding himself together when he asks, “ _Why?_ ”

“They won’t let you take me in,” Gabriel says, voice low. “If I don't finish this, they’ll kill me.”

Jack frowns. He thought Reyes was the ringleader of the coup, he and half of Blackwatch, but if that’s wrong and he’s not, then who—

The answer hits him like a battering ram. Knocks what little breath he’s retained right back out of his lungs. His eyes snap back to Gabriel, who watches him piece it together with the detached interest of somebody who just tried to blow his own head off.

“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me, Reyes— _Talon?_ ” Jack spits the organisation’s name like it’s a curse. “ _That’s_ who you’re in bed with? _”_

Gabriel smiles hollowly.

“Not how I’d put it, but yeah. Talon's giving the orders. I didn’t see a way out, so I agreed.” He laughs, dark and bitter, and adds, “Should've known you'd play the boy-scout.”

Jack looks away, eyes closing in helpless frustration. Anger laps like water in his chest, reaching critical mass.

He digs his nails into his palms in hope that the pinpricks of pain will ground him. They do, but not as much as he thought they would. He’s not ready to face this—to face _him—_ but he’s been given no choice.

“You know what they’ve done,” he says, with a coldness he didn’t realize he possessed. It dawns on him the same moment as it does Gabriel that it’s not Jack who's speaking, but Strike Commander Morrison.

He continues, unrelenting. “You know who they’ve taken, the sacrifices our people have made to stave them off. You know _exactly_ how many of us have died at their hands—I _know_ you do.”

Jack’s eyes are steel when he looks up. He asks again, for the second time in so many minutes, only it isn’t a question now.

It’s an order.

“ _Why_.”

A vicious part of him is pleased to see the indecision, raw and untempered, on Reyes' face. The man was always difficult to read, betraying nothing to nobody, but years of observation has taught Jack how to translate. Before, he’d have given anything to see something other than cold disdain and resentment on the other man’s face.

Now, he feels nothing at all.

Silence fills the space between them and something in Jack breaks; the Strike Commander's mask falters and falls, revealing the tired, disillusioned man beneath.

“You know what? I don’t care,” he snaps, and repeats, once more for feeling, “I don’t care.” He steps back, lips curling into an empty smile. “You kept telling me I lost the right to know you a long time ago. That I wouldn’t listen. Well, you’ve got your wish. I’m receiving it loud and clear.”

Emotion plays on Gabriel’s face, too quickly to identify.

“Jack—”

“ _No_ ,” he says with force, cutting him off with a sharp wave of his hand. “I am _not_ doing this with you. Not while our people are out there putting their lives on the line to fight off what _you_ brought in here.”

Gabriel flinches. A detached part of Jack's mind registers that in all the years they’ve known each other, he’s never seen him do that. It knocks the fire out of him, leaving him to face his anger cold.

“I know you blame me,” he admits, heavily. “I know you think this is all my fault—and hell, maybe you’re right. But at least I remember where my loyalties lie, the duty of care I signed on for when I took this godforsaken job. And I can tell you now, it’s not in here, arguing a lost cause with you.” He points to the door. “It’s out there. With them.”

Jack turns on his heel, knowing all too well he’s giving Reyes the perfect opportunity to stick a knife into his back. He may have just given him motive, too. But he can't keep doing this, not while Talon's in  _his_ _base_. So he leaves. Or tries to.

In the end, it isn't a knife that stops him from leaving the room.

It’s this:

“They knew exactly how to get to me, Jack.”

Gabriel's voice is pitched low and soft, barely audible.

“ _Exactly_ how to get to me,” he says again. “There's only one way Talon got that information—and it wasn’t through my public file.”

Jack stops, tilts his head to show he’s listening. His body itches to leave, but something in the other man’s voice locks his feet into place.

“Damn it, Jack, they _knew_ _everything,_ ” he growls. “Every Blackwatch op was crawling with them. They played on that fear, that  _paranoia—_ that they had eyes everywhere, that I couldn’t trust my own men. When they got to me—and they did—I was so high-strung, they only had to _hint_  that you were involved and I saw red. They’re not entirely wrong, either. This organisation _is_ corrupt and nobody seems to be doing a damn thing about it. What was I _supposed_ to think?”

Jack almost laughs. Would do, if it weren't for the pain eating away at his gut. He didn't think Gabriel had the capacity to hurt him any more than he already had, but once again. Wrong.

"You could have trusted me," he says, hollowly. His eyes are just as vacant when he turns to face him. "If not personally, then professionally."

"How? You didn't exactly inspire trust when you locked me out of the system _—_ don't think I don't know about that," he snaps. "Fuck. Sometimes I feel like I don't even  _know_ you anymore…"

He trails off, jaw clenching. Jack watches him and waits.

"When the UN named you Strike Commander, I was livid," Gabriel begins, anger and resignation warring for dominance in his voice, "and I was right to be. There’s a whole history of people like me being passed over for people like you. Their excuses were just that— _excuses._ But it wasn’t the first time something like that had happened, and it wasn’t going to be the last. I accepted that." He looks at Jack, eyes hard. "What I _couldn’t_ accept was how you took the job without a single word to anyone, least of all me. After all this time and all we’d been through, I thought you’d have my back." He swallows, face softening. "I couldn’t handle knowing that you didn’t. Talon knew that, they— _used_ it. And I let them.”

Jack can't help the skepticism that bleeds into his face, because this—what Gabriel is saying—is understandable. What _isn't_  is everything that happened afterwards: Teaming up with Talon, letting them into the base, siccing mercenaries on their teammates…

Trying to _kill him._

Suddenly, Gabriel's closing the distance between them in four long steps, determination written into the lines of his face. Jack's body tenses of its own accord, hyper-aware of the other man's presence even now, at a time when they couldn't be further apart.

Jack opens his mouth to speak his thoughts, but Gabriel beats him to the punch.

“If it was anyone else, I’d have been fine,” he says, gruffly. “But it was you, Jack.”

Gabriel cards his fingers through his thick curls and hesitates. He drops his hand on Jack’s shoulder, allowing it to linger in a facsimile of how they used to, back when they were friends.

Jack looks at him, sharp eyes studying his face, the vulnerability written into the downward curve of Gabriel's mouth. His gaze then falls to the hand on his shoulder, and for the first time notices something—a small tattoo on the inside of Gabriel’s wrist. The ink is veiled against the deep brown of his skin, unnoticeable except when viewing it up close. Printed there, in unassuming script, are a string of letters:

LXXVI.

A ripple of electricity lances through Jack, hot and urgent, at the realization that what he's looking at is none other than Gabriel's soul-mark. It’s brazen, having it on display, but that’s exactly the sort of thing he’d do—

"It’s always been you," Gabriel says.

Jack never finds out what he means by that, or what his own response would be, because that’s when it happens. An ominous tremor shakes the floor below, hard enough to displace them both. Jack's eyes find Gabriel's, wide and disbelieving. He opens his mouth to yell, but it's too late.

The concussion wave is devastating. It sweeps Jack off his feet, pins him to a nearby wall. The steel is like ice on his back, cool where the rest of him is not. The fire _burns_ , tearing him apart piecemeal, the flames bright and off-color. The pain sets in and he screams, but all that does is allow smoke to curl into his lungs and take residence there.

He’s sinking to the ground, knees cracking against the concrete. His face feels like it’s melting off, and it’s unlike anything he’s ever felt before. Blood, thick and metallic, coats his tongue. His entire body screeches in protest when he tries to move. He looks for Gabriel across the war-torn room, but he can’t see past the wall of flames. The heat is an oppressive blanket against his skin, punching every last wisp of oxygen from his body until he’s doubled-over, shaking and wheezing with it.

He thinks he hears the sound of a choked-off scream of pain, thinks it could be Gabriel. His vision swims before him. He can feel the darkness creeping up on him. He tries desperately to fight it.

He can’t see Gabriel—

He can’t _see._

His last thought before oblivion is a wild stab into the chaos of the room, in a moment when every modicum of his being screams at him to tend to his own, ragged mind first before helping others.

But Jack Morrison is a hero, or so he’s told, and old habits die hard.

He finds the vestiges of Gabriel’s mind, panicked and numb, from across the room and he  _holds_ _._

* 

Jack stirs in the wreckage, skin blanketed by ash and dust.

The flames have died, leaving behind charred remains and ruin. He’s pinned to the ground by a slab of rebar, too numb to move, too tired to care. He takes a single, ragged breath in this new reality—

It’s too sharp, too painful.

Too _real._

Panic cuts into his chest like a knife, swift and silent, cleaving through layers of skin and sinew, muscle and bone. It reaches the core of him—that aching, fragile thing—and _twists_.

Jack digs his fingers into the scorched earth beneath him and screams.

It feels like fire licking down his throat, but he doesn’t stop. He saw his entire world burn to the ground. He can still taste its ashes on his tongue, thick and acrid. He can’t stop.

He screams until there is nothing left in his lungs but smoke. Even then, his head remains tilted back, mouth ajar, tears trickling down past his temples. There’s nothing else here for him—the fight is over and they lost. So why is he alive?

Why can’t he just _die?_

There’s blood against his fingertips, warm and sticky and he may just get his wish. The wound in his side is deep, it bleeds sluggishly, through his singed clothes and into the dirt below.

Maybe this is how it ends, not with a bang but a whimper. No last-minute save, nothing but him in the aftermath and the choice to let go.

All he has to do is let it happen.

Jack closes his eyes. The shock has faded from his system now, replaced by bone-crushing tiredness. Would it be so wrong to just give up?

“ _They knew everything,_ ” says a voice from the deep.

No, not a voice.

A memory _._

_“…there's only one way Talon got that information—and it wasn’t through my public file…”_

“I don’t want this,” Jack whispers, tear-tracks burning a path down his cheeks. His voice is broken, eaten away by smoke. “Just let me go.”

It doesn’t.

_“…I thought you’d have my back. I couldn’t handle knowing that you didn’t…"_

“Stop,” he begs, hands bracketing his ears, nails biting the skin as he writhes helplessly in the dirt.

_“…Talon knew that, they—used it. And I let them…”_

It continues, unrelenting, until _it_ becomes a _he_ and it isn’t some faceless, formless memory, but the rich cadence of Gabriel Reyes’ voice in his ears, in his mind, in _him._ Jack starts to shake, trembling quietly until his entire body is heaving with the weight of his sobs.

Gabriel speaks.

_“…if it was anyone else, I’d have been fine. But it was you, Jack…”_

A pause.

_“It’s always been you.”_

“NO!” Jack yells, and all of a sudden his hands are on the concrete slab on top of him, pushing.

The slab shifts and in seconds he’s tucking his legs tight to his upper body and clearing the space beneath it. It crashes back to the ground with an all-mighty _whump!_ as Jack rolls to the side and onto his stomach, where he stays, panting heavily into the dirt.

It like shards of glass have taken residence in his throat, slithers of white-hot agony that undulate when he swallows. The skin on his face feels like it’s been scraped raw, and his vision—now that he’s cleared the dust from his eyes—is extremely poor. The wound in his side broadcasts a dull but persistent ache, still bleeding through his fingers as he clutches at it with one hand.

Something inside of him implores him to look past the pain. It’s a new kind of determination, spurred by those four words, and the ringing of Gabriel’s voice in his head.

Jack shifts onto his hands and knees, digs into the wreckage above him and pulls _._ The debris comes away slowly and in pieces. He’s exhausted, body one gigantic wound, but he can’t stop. He won’t. He’s being dragged in a tide of grief and anger, and the only handhold he has in this world is the idea that somehow, some way, he’ll make this right.

Sirens whir in the distance, puncturing the silence. Once, the sound would fill him with hope. Now it’s something akin to dread. His stomach clenches at the idea of being taken in; his instincts are all but screaming at him to move—to find help, _yes,_ but somewhere else. Not here.

Not here.

As his hearing returns, so too do other senses. The taste of blood lies heavy on his tongue, thick and metallic. He touches his face, probing gently, and nearly blacks out in pain. It’s no surprise to him that his hands come away freshly red, blood caked under filthy fingernails. He makes his hand into a fist and stares at it for a moment. He can see the outline, but there’s no detail to the picture. No depth.

It should scare him, the idea of these wounds having permanency, but it doesn’t. He’s made the decision to persist, to live if not for himself, than for what he has lost. Ghosts cannot sleep until their past is laid to rest, so that’s what he’ll do—find the people responsible, find out _why._

End this, once and for all.

*

Jack keeps digging until there's nothing left to dig. The night air is humid as he stumbles out of the wreckage and towards the treeline, away from the sound of sirens and the intermittent flash of torch-light in the darkness. 

He looks like death, or a close approximation of it. A layer of grime clings to his skin, hair and clothes. Beneath that, his face is a bloodied mess. His combat fatigues are in tatters, under-armor severely damaged in the blast. He’s running solely on his SEP training at this point—putting one foot in front of the other, to the exclusion of all else.

When he reaches the foliage, his knees buckle; the wound at his side can no longer be ignored.

Hands shaking, he rips a long strip of material from the bottom of his battle coat to use as a tourniquet. The wound is deep and painful, and the damage to his eyes is a significant blow against his coordination. By the time he finishes, he’s broken out in a cold sweat and the shaking has extended past his hands through his whole body. He curls his hands into fists in an attempt to control it. It works. Barely.

He buries what remains of the fabric in the hollow of a nearby tree, ignoring the pang in his chest. It’s for the best, he tells himself. Everybody knows that coat, who it belongs to, and he can’t risk Talon finding out that their explosion didn’t do away with him as planned.

The nearest city is two and a half klicks away. He scales the high-rise fence around the base’s perimeter, albeit without any of his usual grace. The soldier enhancement serum was designed to keep them running in less-than-ideal circumstances, but it didn’t make them invulnerable, least of all mentally. He feels as if his world has tilted off its axis, exhaustion heavy in his bones. But he keeps moving.

He has to.

He’s found staggering alongside a dirt road, a klick and a half away from ground zero of the explosion, by an elderly couple in a pickup truck. They don’t speak a word of English, and his German is rusty at best. Still, they're concerned enough to stop and ask if he needs help—he’ll take what he can get.

He stammers out a sentence he’s convinced is utter nonsense, but the look on the woman’s face is contemplative. The man, however, is wary.

“Please,” he begs, hoping at least some of what he's saying crosses the language barrier. “This is all I have on me.”

He pulls his dog tags from around his neck and hands them to the couple. Recognition bleeds into the old man’s features as he traces the words ‘MORRISON, JACK’ etched into the tag.

Jack wonders, too late, if he’s made a mistake. He can’t bring himself to care either way.

The couple exchange words in hushed tones, too fast for Jack to follow besides the occasional word or phrase. He hears ‘Overwatch’ spill from the man’s lips and his gut tightens like a vice. “No,” he utters, interrupting them. He’s aware that he’s rambling now but is unable to stop. “I can’t go back there. _Please._ ”

He struggles to breathe. It feels like he never left the wreckage, weighed down as he was by debris. Part of him is aware he’s in shock, that he’s about to have a panic attack right here on the side of the road, covered in dirt and grime, ash and blood. His awareness is too far away to blanket the emotion, the raw nerve he has become. It feels like nothing can bring him back from the brink.

Only it does. A sudden weight at his elbow snaps him back into the present, like the crack of a whip through the air. It’s the woman, her hand resting gently on his forearm. Jack looks up, startled, and she smiles at him. She nods, looks to her husband who looks to Jack, eyes searching his face for something. Whatever it is he seems to find it, because he too nods ever so slightly and walks back to the truck. For his part, Jack breathes out a sigh, shoulders slackening.

The woman ushers him into the cab, reaches for the thick wool blanket at her feet which she throws around his shoulders, tucking it in tightly. She whispers something to him that he doesn’t understand in its entirety, but one word does stand out—a word he’s heard Angela use in passing before. He thinks it means ‘ _protection’._

Jack relaxes into the blanket, peering out through heavy-lidded eyes as the man starts the truck. It shudders to life all around them, rickety on the rough dirt road, but there’s a rhythm to it after a while, and he finds himself relaxing despite the bumps.

He’s nodding off when something up ahead catches his eye and he stiffens.

A vehicle is parked on the shoulder of the road, the words ‘UN Emergency Response’ emblazoned on its side. To make matters worse, a figure in a high-visibility vest is beside it, indicating for them to stop.

He doesn’t dare glance in the rear-view mirror to check his appearance, but if it’s anywhere near as bad as how he feels—like a war-zone—they’re going to have questions.

They approach the makeshift checkpoint fast. Not stopping isn’t an option anymore.

Jack glances over at the old woman, surprised to see the defiance in her eyes. She pillows her head against her closed hands, the universal sign for sleep, and points at him. He scrambles to follow her suggestion, pulling up the blanket until only the crop of his hair is visible and resting his head on the windowsill. The long blanket covers most of his body—only his legs are visible, and in the dull light of the cab, the grime on his boots can be mistaken for dust from the road.

It’s the only plan they have and it’s nerve-wracking as all hell. He isn’t built to sit idly by while someone else takes a hit for him, and yet that’s exactly what he’s doing. Before he can second-guess it, the truck shudders to a stop and a stranger’s voice addresses the couple in polite German. The man replies readily, his tone light. Jack loses track of the conversation quickly, unable to find meaning in the exchange.

The woman’s hand falls onto his shoulder and he resists the urge to tense, focusing instead on remaining as lax and still as he can. She speaks in a hushed tone to the person outside; he can’t understand what she is saying but he can hear the fondness in her voice. Two words stick out to him, repeated several times by her— _sohn,_ meaning son, and the name Henrick, which he assumes is him.

He resists the urge to look when all three of them lapse into silence, and is rewarded for his efforts by a string of words he actually understands as the couple echo the stranger’s farewell of “gute nacht”.

It’s only when they’re driving away from the checkpoint that Jack raises his head from the sill, eyes adjusting to the dull glow of their headlights on the road in front of them.

His mouth is dry as he looks at the woman, then the man. Both strangers, but having done more for him in half an hour than most of the people he knew and associated with on a day-to-day basis.

“Thank you,” he says to them both, then adds in poorly-accented German, “Danke.”

The woman smiles at him again, pats his arm.

The man adds gruffly, “Bitte.” _You’re welcome._

The excitement saps him of most of his strength and he collapses back in the seat to stare vacantly out the window, watching the countryside pass them by. At some point, he closes his eyes, and the combination of the day’s events, exhaustion and the warmth of the blanket still slung around his shoulders pushes him down into the arms of sleep where, mercifully, he doesn't dream.

*

Jack wakes in excruciating pain, the beginnings of a scream on his lips.

In the haze of sound and sight, he registers his surroundings. He’s in a hospital bed, hooked up to all kinds of machinery, including an intravenous drip that pumps a clear liquid into the crook of his elbow. He frowns at it, unable to discern what exactly it is or why it’s there.

 _Painkillers,_ the nurse tells him later, but whatever it is they’re giving him isn’t working. He can feel the pain like a brand on his skin, biting deep and hot. It’s unlike anything he’s ever felt before—worsening by degrees, nigh on unbearable and always, always present.

Even in sleep it lingers, manifesting as alien voices in his dreams. It echoes in his teeth, the death-rattle of an explosion in the distance, and the seizing of his body, buried under rubble. He can’t move—can barely breathe through the assault on his senses. When he inevitably jolts awake, it’s there to greet him anew. There isn’t a moment when it’s not there.

The on-call staff attempt to reconcile his lack of symptoms with the agony he’s in, and ultimately fail. There’s no medical explanation for it, nothing that can explain away the pain of being pulled apart and put back together again, at what feels like his very base level. He’s dying just to be brought back to life at the last possible moment—cells aflame, burning from the inside out—and the doctors can’t tell him _why._

Days pass like hours as he fights to stay awake for longer than a few scattered minutes at a time. He gets vague impressions: cycling in and out of consciousness, hooked up to all kinds of drugs.

None of them work.

They verge upon a week with no change so the hospital recruits a specialist, who postulates that the pain is a side-effect of a broken soul bond.

Jack doesn’t tell them that that’s impossible—he’s never been bonded, never even met his match. The tattoo on the inside of his arm is of a mask, not unlike the skull of a bird. If he’d met his soulmate, even for an instant, he’d know.

There’s a broadcast feed in his tiny box of a hospital room. At one point it’s switched on, playing one holo or another, when it gets interrupted by the news. Touched upon, among many things, is the aftermath of the explosion at Overwatch’s Swiss HQ. Several bodies have been recovered from the site, the UN providing a preliminary list of the dead, though the liaison warns that it is not conclusive, that the investigation is still ongoing. The news concludes on the note that while Strike Commander Morrison has yet to be found alive or dead, the body of senior officer and Omnic Crisis veteran Gabriel Reyes has been recovered.

Jack's unaware he's shaking until he closes his eyes, whereupon it worsens, a bone-deep chill in deepest parts of him.

He remembers the long crawl from the debris after the explosion, remembers digging not only for a way out, but for another body.

There had been nothing there.

At the time, he hadn't been surprised; he and Reyes were part of the same augmentation program—their tolerance towards various forms of outside stimuli, including the explosive kind, are identical—so if Jack survived, then so too could he. It made sense to assume he had. It made  _perfect sense._

And yet _…_

The last moments of the explosion play out behind his eyes like an old show-reel. When the concussion wave ripped through the building, they were separated, Jack shielded from the worst of the explosion by the debris. The last time he saw Gabriel before he saw nothing at all, the man was consumed by smoke and fire and that strange, cloying gas that had filled the room.

Then there had been the scream.

He replays the scene again and again in his mind, looking for something— _anything_ —he’s missed, but there’s nothing.

Gabriel Reyes is dead.

The thought triggers the pain, his new and constant companion. It drills into the marrow of his bones, flays him from the inside out. He spends two days in a fugue state, recognizing nothing and nobody. It narrows his worldview until the only thing he can see, feel, hear, taste and touch—the only thing he _knows_ to be real—is the pain.

Jack takes it, because he has to, but also because it’s deserved.

He failed. Not just the mission, or Overwatch, or himself.

He failed _Gabe._

He’d turned his back on him when he needed him the most, and every moment after that, too caught up in his own stubbornness to even think about making the first move at repairing what they had lost. Only an idiot could miss how fractured everything had become without the two of them presenting a united front, and still—even as the evidence of corruption came to light, the stink of foul play—Jack chose to bury his head in the sand rather than face it.

And they hailed the Strike Commander as a hero.

Agony festers low in his gut, because Gabriel was right—he doesn't deserve the title.

He never has.

If he knew back then that this is where he’d end up—hospitalized and alone, wracked by pain and guilt, at the very end of his tether—he would have never accepted that damn promotion. That had been the tipping point where everything flew off-kilter. After all their hard work in the Omnic Crisis, the mantle had felt like a natural progression, a stepping stone to something greater—to transform Overwatch into the bastion of peace and progression he’d always dreamed of, even as a farmer’s boy.

He was so caught up in the ideal—and his own arrogance—that he hadn’t seen what was right in front of him. At least, that’s what he’d told himself at the time.

The truth is less kind.

Jack saw the signs and he ignored them. The frayed conversations, the signs of underlying stress, the brittle edge of a smile that was so clearly false…

He knew his friend was in pain, and he buried it in platitudes of hope and promise. Their friendship had soured in his willful ignorance. For all he spoke about the future, he’d neglected to think about what would happen to theirs. He’d known how Gabriel felt and he did nothing. He put his career before his friend, and look where that got them.

Gabriel is  _dead_.

Nearly catatonic, Jack’s only thought is that this is his fault. All of it, irrevocably.

And there’s no going back.

*

The pain fades somewhere around the eight-day mark and Jack comes back into the world. Everything about him is raw—his skin, pink and newly-healed; his mind, unacquainted with this new, painless existence; his soul, slack with grief and guilt—but now that he’s responding, the doctors are able to measure the full extent of his wounds.

The damage to his sight isn’t going away, so they begin rehabilitation. He isn’t completely blind—he can see what’s right in front of him, and anything beyond that is vaguely discernible, albeit a blur. It’s a significant thorn in his side, however, and he takes what help they can give, submitting himself to a battery of sight and mobility tests, one after the other in a relentless chain of activity, pushing past his known limits and into uncharted territory as they check and recheck his reflexes. At the end of the day, he’s convinced he’s used each and every muscle at least once during the tests, because his body feels like one large, dull ache.

The doctors seem satisfied with his results, and send them off for processing. They escort him back to his room, where he falls asleep as soon as his head touches his pillow. It’s a deep and effortless slumber.

It feels like the first proper rest he’s had in years.

Two days later, he meets with the specialist, Dr. Einarsson, who hands him a small case.

“I want you to wear these for as long as you can today,” he says. “If you experience any pain after the first few hours, let myself or one of the nurses know—it’s not uncommon to get headaches during this period, but we’ll want to make note of it just in case.

“Tomorrow, if you’re feeling up to it,” and here he smiles at Jack, wide and patient, “we’ll run you through the tests again and compare the results. Until then, I’ll leave you with this. It has a list of exercises that should help you get used to wearing them.”

He places a data-pad on the table between them.

“You’re the boss,” Jack says coolly. He likes Einarsson—the doctor is a genuinely good person—but he’s not exactly holding his breath that this will work. Not on the first try, at least.

He opens the case.

The glasses are black, sleek and anti-flash. Einarsson walks him through the design, namely the reflective lenses—to cover the scar tissue around his eyes—and the wrap-around frames—to prevent additional eye strain. He can toggle the level of sight assistance depending on their use, shifting from mild sharpening on near-sighted objects, to full support on far-sighted ones, where he needs it the most.

By the end of the demonstration, Jack is overwhelmed.

“Are you all right, John?” Einarsson asks.

The name throws him for a moment, until he remembers that the staff don’t actually know who he is. To them, he's a John Doe.

It wouldn’t take much for them to find out his real name. A run of his prints against the government database and they’d have everything on his public record, maybe more. He knows they want to, in the same way he knows that they haven’t—because they can’t _._ He was submitted to their care in anonymity, and as soon as he was lucid enough to communicate, he requested they maintain it, citing his own safety as the reason.

They may have suspicions, but nothing they can prove; Jack knows his rights and their hands are tied.

The lie didn’t bother him before, so he can’t understand why it does now. Perhaps it’s the realization that the glasses are as far from standard issue as they can get—bordering on military grade—or that the doctor treats him like a person, not an admission number.

He considers correcting him, but decides against it.

It’s better this way.

He swallows past the lump in his throat, manages a gruff, “Yeah. Thanks, doc.”

Einarsson smiles, his blue eyes kind. Jack feels something in him splinter at that kindness and looks away, unable to disguise his reaction. He stares down at the glasses, wonders what it will be like to wear them. If he’ll feel normal again. As if he’s ever felt that.

“You’re welcome,” Einarsson says. He touches Jack’s shoulder, once, and leaves.

When he’s alone, and the panic in his chest is almost gone, Jack gets to his feet and walks slowly to the adjoining bathroom, case in tow.

He stands in front of the mirror, as close as he can get to it over the lip of the sink. The blurred lines of his vision sharpen enough for him to look— _really_ look, in a way he hasn’t been able to since he arrived. His eyes rove the short crop of dull, golden hair on his head—he tries not to think about how quickly it’s turning white, preferring to be thankful that he still _has_ hair—before moving to his face.

Two fat gashes split his face, the damage a deep and angry red. The skin around the cuts is torn but healing, fading to pink at the edges. He runs a finger over it, careful to avoid the cuts, and notes a rough, uneven texture that he hasn’t felt there before. Even once it’s healed, it won’t ever look the same. The fire’s parting gift, it seems.

He takes the plunge and looks himself in the eye. The cornflower-blue of his irises ring his pupils, which shrink in the white, artificial light of the bathroom. It’s startling, really, how little change there is on the surface of his eyes, when everything within has been altered so completely.

Jack steps back as if in demonstration, and the detail in his face distorts, unattainable. The further back he goes, the worse it gets, until he’s nothing more than a white-pink smear on the mirror’s surface.

Sighing deeply, he moves back to his original place in front of the mirror and slips on the glasses.

The fog in his vision just… disappears, consumed by the knife-edged sharpness that is suddenly, inexplicably everywhere. There’s a new gravity to the room, bearing down hard, and he feels weighted by it, while simultaneously freed. He repeats the motion, one step back after the other, and marvels at the way that his vision adjusts, lightning-fast, to the new stimuli. He doesn’t think he’s seen this clearly since he started the SEP, and that was bordering on twenty years ago, now.

The emotion rising in his chest isn’t happiness, not really. It’s more like readiness.

He’s been on the defensive for years, ever since the relationship between Overwatch and the public soured—perhaps even before then. At some point in time, his movements became the result of others and never really changed back to being his.

He’s been on the back foot all this time, reacting.

Now he’s ready to be _proactive_.

A grim smile twists his lips, tugging at the newly-healed skin. In the mirror, his reflection does the same. The glasses only accentuate the new look that the scars have given him. It isn’t enough to safeguard his identity, not completely, but it’s a start.

Without the blue-eyed stare and the mantle of Strike Commander, Jack looks older. Harder. He feels like he’s been scraped back to his base components, remodeled in the image of this new world that is simultaneously lighter and darker, bigger and smaller, better and worse. In shedding his name, he’s shucked the naivety and responsibility of his past, and become something else.

He’s no longer a leader, a diplomat or a peacekeeper. None of those will survive out there, in a domain punctuated by violence, secrets and lies. Of all the titles he’s ever held—of all the things he’s ever been—only one remains suitable.

 _Soldier_.

His eyes close behind the lenses of his glasses. There’s something comforting about the dark, like it knows what it is and never concerns itself with what it should be. He thought he could be part of something greater and that it, in turn, would make _him_ great.

For a time, he almost believed it.

It’s so far beyond belief now, and he can’t tell if that’s a good or bad thing. It feels like a dream slowly spoiling into a nightmare, the world around him growing darker by degrees.

This here, though. This moment. He’s facing the darkness by choice, his first real act in a sea of reactions.

This is him, waking up.

*

It takes him an hour to crack Einarsson's data-pad. Once he’s in, he opens a back door to his old system and gets to work.

He avoids anything pertaining to his role as Strike Commander. As tempting as it is, he doesn’t want to trip whatever flags the UN has put in place there. Until he gets answers as to how they allowed something like this to happen, he’s not willing to trust them. Better for them to martyr him in death then throw him to the wolves—which is precisely what they’d do if they knew he was alive.

He focuses instead on contingencies developed before he got the position. He’d maintained them almost obsessively when he was in charge—checking and rechecking his exit strategies, staying up-to-date on his rent, keeping his papers valid—all strictly off grid. Jack was an idealist back then, but he was never green. What they did during the Omnic Crisis, the things that never made it to print—he believed in a better path because he _knew_ the alternative, and it wasn’t what he wanted for his men.

(Later, when Blackwatch stopped being an inside joke between founding members and took on a life of its own, he saw that path taken again, but it is only with the benefit of hindsight now that he understands what he did to stop it wasn’t enough, that what he _should_ have done was force the issue between he and Reyes out into the open and deal with it there, in all its patchwork glory. He hadn’t known if it would work, didn’t want to take the risk and find out. He still doesn’t know, and now he never will.)

His paranoia pays off, because it’s all in there: a safe-house in Dorado, tech and weapon caches, cash, visas, passports, _covers_ , and—most importantly—information. It’s nothing grandiose, just enough to get him by, but it’s a solid foundation to work from, and that’s worth more than anything right now.

He hasn’t been to Dorado in years, but from what he gleans on the extranet, the streets are succumbing to the burgeoning control of the Los Muertos gang. He’s tempted to go nip it in the bud, but bringing down a gang singlehandedly is no easy task. It requires research, preparation and no small amount of patience. Given time, he could achieve the first two, but the last is out of his reach. Jack is gunning for blood; he _needs_ it, and it’s what will get him killed.

He’ll clean house once he’s up and running, no doubt about that.

Until then, the plan is to assume the identity of one of his existing covers, clear out the caches and establish a base of operations in a quiet area, with the safe-house as a back-up.

The biggest and most glaring obstacle is his recovery. He needs to know where he stands without the sugar-coating he’ll be given if he asks. Einarsson might level with him, but Jack would prefer to keep the good doctor out of this—plausible deniability and all that.

His only option is to access his file on the hospital’s server. So he does. It isn’t pretty, but it’s what he’s after. He reads the bulk of the notes with detached interest, as if it belonged to someone else.

According to the notes, he suffered major abdominal trauma and internal bleeding, believed to be from high-velocity impact with an unknown object. He was sent into emergency surgery almost as soon as he was admitted into the hospital and it was a resounding success.

The rest of his injuries are given a hodgepodge of different treatments. Multiple lacerations to his face were treated with sutures, and the second-degree burns to his body were treated with a skin-graft. The doctors note a high likelihood of scarring from one, if not both, but the damage is largely cosmetic. Possible stereoblindness due to head injuries, tests inconclusive but ongoing. The recommended treatment is for prototype lenses, created and authorized by Dr. Markus Einarsson. He has paresis to one of his vocal cords, which can be treated with vocal therapy; Jack wasn’t aware of this before, but it makes sense—his voice has been raspy for days, and no amount of clearing his throat seems to help. It’s not unrecognizable from what it was before, but neither is it an immediate give-away as to who he is. It’s an additional layer of cover for him, one he’s happy to make use of.

But it's the last paragraph that throws him completely, words cutting like knives into his skin:

> _The patient experienced severe pain during his first week of admission. The cause is unknown, but theorized to be the sudden and violent breakdown of a soul-bond. The patient entered a dissociative state, during which he was non-verbal. Application of intravenous therapy was successful in providing parenteral nutrients, but painkillers were ineffective, further reinforcing that the pain was psychosomatic in origin. After a period of nine days, the patient began to respond, and treatment of physical injuries could continue. It is recommended the patient engage with a bond therapist at a later date. Supplementary material to be provided in the meantime._

Jack’s fingers worry at the band around his left bicep. He inches it up, enough to glimpse the mark beneath. The black ink stands out in bold contrast to the pale skin of his underarm. The mask has no eyes, only slits where they should be. He feels the weight of its gaze all the same.

There’s something incredibly jarring about the phrase, ‘ _the sudden and violent breakdown of a soul-bond’._

His eyes gravitate towards it, not so much the words as their formation on the page—the lines and curves of the typeface against the off-blue screen of the data-pad. He can’t seem to look away.

Jack doesn’t subscribe to their theory that the pain was the result of a broken soul-bond. Not even for a second. But it is too convenient a smokescreen for him _not_ to maintain. The doctors assume the answers to their questions without ever actually asking him; they speak carefully around him to avoid taking him back to that night, all because of some misguided notion that he’s _lesser_ now. That he's lost.

It’s as much cowardice as it is convenience, however. If they rule out the idea of a broken bond, they’ll want to look into what else it could be—where it came from, if it will occur again—and that isn’t something he can handle. Not ever, but especially not right now. It's like taunting a wild animal after being mauled; the pain is too crisp, too fresh in his memory.

He doesn’t know if he can survive that again.

Jack swallows the panic. Forces it past the lump in his throat.

Closing his eyes, he finds relief in the form of a memory, fragmented but happy, of the day he received his mark. He sinks his weight into it, collapsing back into a simpler time. Submerged, he opens his mind, and it's like a whole other life stretched out before him. Limitless.

Jack's eight years old, strapped into the passenger seat of his father’s truck as it volleys through the cornfield, air whistling through his open window, tugging at his face and hair. Dad's laugh booms across the cab as they chase the light, a brush of flannel against his cheek as he leans over to ruffle his hair. Birds slice the otherwise spotless blue sky, powerful wings propelling dart-like bodies through the air.

His elation hits a fever pitch when Dad hits the brakes and his body jolts towards the dashboard, the motion aborted by the seatbelt across his upper body that he fumbles with as they exit the car and disappear into the maize. Jack flits around his father as he checks the stalks, dashing in and out of the crops, finding new ways to amuse himself on the hot, summer's day.

The warmth begins as a trickle against the skin of his arm that he mistakes for sunlight at first, until the trickle becomes a flood and he can see the formation of the mark, black ink blossoming to life across his skin like the sweet-smelling flowers in his mother’s garden, yellow-orange faces tilted towards the sun. He loses himself in the excitement of the moment, sprinting off to find Dad, who's waiting by the truck for him, studying his large, callused palms; Dad takes one look at the black smudge of the mark on Jack’s arm and laughs, a bright and happy sound, reaching down to scoop him into a bear hug.

Jack can still feel the brush of his bearded chin against his forehead, thirty years later. The cold of the hospital room is leeched away by the memory; the oppressive warmth of summer, the hopes and dreams of a child…

Eight-year-old Jack struggles out of his father’s embrace, but does so smiling. Dad’s voice wraps fondly around the words, ‘looks like you’ve found yourself a partner there, Jack’ and there’s the give of fabric as he rips a strip off his shirt to tie around the newly-formed mark, blue eyes sparkling as he explains how it's the done thing around here, that Jack's soul-mark is a private thing meant for him alone but ‘yeah, kid, of course you can show your mom'. Jack feels like he could burst, he’s so happy, and all he does on the trip back is play with that band of flannel against his arm, peeking at the lines beneath it. A secret.

 _His_ secret.

The memory whites out, drawing Jack forward through time where his heart beats a staccato rhythm through his fingers, still pressed flush against the soul-mark. He sharpens his focus to the air in his lungs and the mechanics of drawing a breath. In and out. In and out. The gentle rise and fall of his chest is the only motion in the still, dark room until slowly, carefully, his body calms.

When Jack wakes in the morning, the data pad is wedged beneath his pillow. He dismisses his patient file with a flick of his wrist, opens the extranet and, without a single moment of hesitation, books a flight out of Zurich for the day after next.

*

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> • Anyone who takes the time to leave a comment on this is an absolute legend. I've put a lot of hours into this story, and I'm incredibly keen to hear what you think, especially if you're enjoying it so far.  
> • If the pacing has you worried, don't be! This is the only part set in this time period.  
> • The next part is scheduled for Monday 9th, though it may be earlier for some as I live in Sydney, eleven hours ahead of GMT.  
>   
> There will be more, so stay tuned!


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> • The reception for this story has absolutely blown me away. My everlasting thanks to everyone who has liked, commented on and bookmarked this work. I have so much more to share with you, and I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I did writing it.  
> • While the writing is all my own, inspiration was drawn from Australian author Matthew Reilly for the action scenes in this chapter. If you're looking for a fun, action-packed read, check out his work [here](http://www.matthewreilly.com/the-novels).  
> • In saying that, some of the logistics of these scenes are hand-wavy to the extreme. Apologies in advance.  
> • Enjoy!  
>   
> 

# ii: wrong from right

*

 _But in my head_ _I am still there,_  
_I can still feel you,_  
_Breathing slow;_  
_I've known this dream for a long time._

*

Soldier: 76 cuts an imposing figure at the base of the flat-topped mountain. He moves with an ease that belies the chill in the air, kicking up a spray of snow with each heavy footfall as he runs. His neoprene under-suit staves off the worst of the cold, exertion taking care of the rest.

The Helix Security personnel stationed at the border aren’t so lucky. They mill about a small lantern, blowing into gloved hands to conserve heat. They’re too preoccupied by the howling wind—signalling the arrival of another wet winter at Colorado’s Grand Mesa—to pay attention to the smudge of color that jumps the chain link fence and lands soundlessly inside the perimeter.

Jack’s hand hovers over the gun in his thigh holster, a small caliber pistol he'll use if pressed. Beneath his black fatigues and trademark jacket, he’s spoiling for a fight. The stab-resistant kevlar plating over his impact rig and field armor offers full range of motion and defense from the enemy; he’s ready for whatever comes his way, and then some.

Even the jacket has been modified to carry ammunition and grenades, making it an integral part of his battle dress. A relic of a bygone era, it once belonged to his father. It fit Jack like a glove when he first slipped it on, broad shoulders smoothing out wrinkles in the leather, and hasn't left his side since. Thus coining the nickname—Soldier: 76.

Moments pass. Jack remains unnoticed by the guards. He moves towards cover, finds it in the shadow of the rock-face, hand still poised above the gun. When no resistance is forthcoming, he forces himself to relax, using the reprieve to assess his surroundings.

The crags of the mesa glisten in the rain. The world beneath is blanketed by snow, including the entrance to the Watchpoint, which is itself cut deep into the mountain. In Overwatch's prime, Grand Mesa was the head of clandestine weapons research and development, not the kind of place you made accessible to outsiders. As such, there are only two entrances in this sector: the service elevator and a maintenance hatch.

Jack weighs his options. The elevator is faster but will likely be under surveillance, if not manned by additional security personnel. For all that he’s ready for this to dissolve into a fight, he’d prefer not to engage until he has what he came for.

Which leaves the hatch. In the relative darkness of the storm, it would take hours to find.

Jack doesn’t have that luxury, which is why he came prepared.

Taking pride of place across his face, feeding a constant stream of data on his environment, is Einarsson’s latest gift—the tactical visor. He lifted the schematics from a terminal at Watchpoint: Ares last year and figured it would do more good in the doctor's hands than sitting in storage somewhere. The military research was years ahead of anything available to the public. Might even save lives.

An appropriate thank you—and apology—for the man who saved his.

Jack wasn’t expecting a response. Not after he escaped the hospital’s care and became a wanted fugitive. A few weeks after his anonymous submission, however, he received a reply. Two words only.

_On it._

Six months and a safety-deposit box in Ilios later, Jack got his hands on the prototype and the rest, as they say, is history. The visor handles like a dream—responsive, intuitive, matching him every step of the way. He’s seen his fair share of fighting over the past few years, most of them at old Overwatch bases like this one, and it’s risen to every challenge he’s presented it thus far.

Jack opens an overlay of Watchpoint: Grand Mesa’s schematics on his visor and gets to work.

He finds the maintenance hatch a few hundred feet away from his position, buried beneath a thick layer of snow, and pries it open carefully. The thick padding of his motorcycle gloves buffers the screech of its hinges as he lowers himself into the hole and closes the hatch above him.

He wastes no time in the shaft, shimmying down the ladder at record speed, only stopping once to calibrate the visor's heads-up display. As his feet touch solid ground at the base of the shaft, it adjusts accordingly to the absence of light.

Jack refers back to the overlay. According to the schematics, his prize is in the weapons research vault located at the heart of the facility. The hatch he entered through opens up into the maintenance tunnels beneath the base, which span a good three-quarters of the map. He can follow them part of the way, but as soon as he reaches the laboratories, he’ll have no choice but to go up.

This doesn't surprise him in the least; Overwatch R&D were too smart to risk someone tampering with their experiments, especially when those experiments became… _explosive_.

He shakes his head, dispelling the thought, and starts through the tunnel, gun out and game-face on.

The only source of light in the grim, dark hall is the faint red glow of his visor and a scattering of dim, halogen lights above the exits. The building seems hollowed out; there isn’t a soul in sight. Flanked on either side by rusted metal walls, each corridor identical to the last, he can see why the security team would avoid coming down here. It’s too easy to get lost.

His feet slow as he reaches his entry point to the upper level. He eyes the scanner by the door and reminds himself that this is the easy part. Once he waves his card over the sensor, one of two things will happen: the door will open, or it won’t. Adrenaline, heady and sharp, hits him at the thought. His hands curl into fists.

Soldier: 76 prepares for a fight the same way he does all things. Methodically. Meticulously. _Competently_. He checks his gun—fully loaded, safety off—the biotic syringes strapped to his bicep—primed for use—his way in—access card, data drives—and his way out—twice confirmed.

With all systems checked, he withdraws the access card from his pocket and waves it across the scanner by the door. It emits a shrill beep and the red strip of light turns green.

“Show time,” he grunts, and hits the entry point running.

The maintenance tunnel—dark, narrow and rusted—disappears in an instant, replaced by its polar opposite. Jack emerges into a well-lit corridor branching off in both directions, the walls a steely grey.

A warning flashes across his visor, followed immediately by his preempted response:

 _> ALERT! Surveillance drone detected_  
_> Processing countermand file gm_1.exe  
__> Uploading gm_1.exe (3%)_  

He dashes down the corridor towards the research and development precinct, his focus split between the flight of stairs in front of him and the steady climb of the progress bar in the periphery of his vision. It jumps in leaps and bounds—8% to 12%, 26% to 34%—until it reaches the half-way mark and starts to trickle. He sighs inwardly, but presses on. He has to trust that it will get him through.

Jack continues forward until the proximity alarm flashes across the display. He ducks into a nearby storage room just in time to watch a surveillance drone roll lazily by, its disc-like body hovering a few feet off the floor as it roves its sensor back and forth. 

As a private security firm, Helix Security International doesn’t have clearance to access what remains of Watchpoint: Grand Mesa’s surveillance grid. The drones are their solution to that problem. Small and agile, they possess no combat ability, but emit a loud, piercing siren when triggered, as well as alerting the guards to their exact location and quadrant on the map.

He’d prefer to avoid that where possible, hence the countermand. His program disables part of the grid under the guise of a system error, drawing the attention of the drones—tricked into believing the error is genuine—and, if he’s lucky, the guards as well—out of suspicion that it isn’t. If he’s lucky, he’ll have a clear shot at the vault. If he isn’t, well…

It’s a risk, but feints always are. This one is the oldest in the book, simple but effective. If there was anything the Omnic Crisis taught him, it’s that even the meanest machine can be hacked. When you’ve sifted through the thousand lines of code that make up a God Program, everything else seems easy by comparison.

Kneeling behind the storage room door, Jack eyes the percentage bar on the visor. It jumps from 94% to 98%—then 98% to 100%. Words cascade down the side of the screen:

 _>_ _Uploading gm_1.exe (100%)_  
_> Upload complete_  
_> Initializing…_  
_> Task complete successfully_  
_> Time remaining until system reset 00:19:58_  
_> 00:19:57_  
_> 00:19:56  
__> 00:19:55_

Jack hears the whir of the drone’s servos as it rushes past the storage room, lips splitting into a grin behind his face-plate as the visor confirms it’s path away from him.  _Towards the decoy._

The hallway beyond yawns empty so he pushes on, moving fast, staying low. He follows the map as it tracks his location, ducking around corners, weaving through rooms when they offer a short-cut. At the entrance to the laboratories, he double-checks the map. Going on through will give him extra time in the vault—and he needs every second he can get.

He scans his access card at the panel by the door. A familiar shift from red to green and it slides open.

The labs stretch out before him, dim and cold and sterile. Refrigerators that once housed test samples are switched off, bulbs dead, their contents long removed. What testing apparatus remains is covered in thin, white tarp and immaculately clean.

A chill lances through Jack's chest, taking him aback. He tries to shake it off by stepping further in the room but it lingers, resilient.

There’s something in the air, an aroma but _palpable_ —chewing away on the edges of his vision, like short-term synesthesia, there and then gone. It slips through the filters in his face-plate, this specter of sight and smell, crawls into his mouth and down his throat and takes residence in his lungs, siphoning at his breath, puncturing him with its presence. The smell of smoke is so thick in his nose and on his tongue that it _burns,_  black wisps flickering in and out of existence, spooling and un-spooling in his line of sight.

And as soon as it arrived—suddenly, with force—the chill recedes and with it, the assault on his senses. Jack goes from being completely compromised, out of touch with his own body, to being forced back into it—dizzyingly so—in an instant. Control feels like pins and needles up his arms and down his sides. 

(After what just happened, control feels like an illusion.)

Jack’s left running hot in a room that’s bitingly cold, feeling for all the world like a thousand people are pressed up beside him. There’s nobody here but him, and that’s the real problem, isn’t it? It isn’t the room itself but the lack of people. _His_ people. 

He fights to stay focused. Overwatch is dead and gone. All that’s left is the ashes of what it was, this hollowed-out shell of a Watchpoint, occupied by strangers…

And him.

He sighs. Time to keep moving.

*

Jack reaches the vault with time to spare, despite the incident in the labs. Compared to meandering through the hallways with every chance of encountering resistance, his moment of detachment is but a drop in the ocean, inconsequential in the scheme of things. 

It doesn’t feel that way, but he tries not to think about it, focusing instead on the task ahead. His access card won’t work here—the vault has a separate security system from the rest of the base. He pulls out a data-pad and gets to work on cracking the code, aware of the timer counting down in the periphery of his vision.

 _> 00:10:05_  
_> 00:10:04  
__> 00:10:03_  

He cracks through the first few layers without incident, but it all spirals out of control from there. The vault’s mainframe is unlike any he’s ever seen, though it shares some similarities with the one at HQ.

In fact, the base code seems to be the same, even if all the extra parameters are not. It isn’t ideal, but it’s something he can work off of, so he follows it deeper down the rabbit hole—

—and stops dead.

“No,” he huffs, voice soft with surprise. His words catch on a laugh, a testament to the impossibility of what he’s seeing: “That can’t be right.”

But it is, and the longer he thinks about it, the more it makes sense.

The UN was so quick to wipe its hands of anything Overwatch they paid a private security company to guard Watchpoint: Grand Mesa, rather than extradite its contents to another facility. It isn’t such a stretch, then, that they didn’t bother to remove old access codes from the system—especially this one, since as far as they’re concerned, the only two men who know about it are dead.

Reyes did it on a dare, the first day they set up shop in the new base. They expected to be written up immediately, only nobody noticed, and as the days ticked over—both of them stewing in anticipation of a reprimand—the gag shifted from the code itself to how long they could keep it there before someone found out. Jack encountered it again as Strike Commander, hesitated and ultimately left it there, though there was no logical reason why he should have. They no longer shared those easy smiles and knowing looks. The air between them sat heavy with tension.

He wonders if Reyes ever bothered to look and see if it was still there. Jack hopes he did.

"To hell with it," he says, and punches in the command.

He has nothing to lose at this point, and everything to gain. Jack's good at hacking, but Reyes— _Gabe,_ his mind corrects, _back then he was Gabe_ —took to it like an art form. The master to Jack’s apprentice, it appears he still has something to teach him.

If anything can get him into the vault, it’s this.

As the data-pad whirs, Jack checks the timer. Seven minutes to get in and out. If this doesn’t work, it’ll take him another five to get in.

 _Shit._

Jack's so caught up in his own thoughts that he misses the faint _click_. What he doesn't miss is the sight of the heavy door slipping open, almost anticlimactically, to reveal the jewel at the heart of the structure:

The weapons research vault.

Jack disconnects the pad and steps through in a daze. The room beyond is spacious yet crowded, cordoned off like a library by row upon row of shelves, only instead of books they house prototypes—meticulously numbered, cataloged and sealed in individual metal cases.

It’s an impressive sight, surpassed only by the vault at Overwatch HQ, twice as big and home not just to weapon prototypes but all sorts of tech—some scavenged during the Omnic Crisis, unsafe for public consumption—and all of it vaporized in an instant by the explosion.

The thought tugs at him regretfully. They found some truly amazing things over the years.

Jack flocks to the holo-screen in the middle of the room and enters in the credentials of the first user he finds with system access. Getting through the front door was the hard part—once inside, the security isn’t so tight. In fact, he could probably enter his _own_ credentials if he wanted to, but he doesn’t. For all that it would be worth a laugh, it would also be a dead give-away to who broke in—and he’d prefer to keep it under wraps.

He’s in. Hands flying across the keyboard, Jack punches in the prototype code. The program sifts through the data and— _there._ R9-035. Row and designation number.

He makes note of both numbers and closes the archive program in favor of another command prompt. Hooking up his data-pad, he hits the search button. Instantly, the two devices begin communicating.

With three minutes left on the timer, Jack goes to claim his prize.

On the outside, R9-035 looks no different to any other case on the shelf. The metal box scintillates in the light, clean and cold, the sight of his gloved hands either side of it—alternating shades of black and red leather—extrinsic, bordering on obscene. He’s an element of chaos in their ordered ranks, an aberration in the vault’s otherwise perfect uniformity.

Jack pops the locks and pulls back the lid.

At the center of the foam inlay is a mean-looking assault rifle, prototype designation: TMFR_Heavy Pulse.

He pulls the gun from the case, assesses the feel of it in his hands. Like the name suggests, it’s heavy, built for someone with above-average strength. It won’t take long to learn how to handle it; the design is remarkably similar to the rifle he wielded as Strike Commander. With a few noticeable upgrades, it seems.

Lining the top of the case are several small, rocket-like projectiles that fit into a slot at the base of the rifle. Jack pulls one from the inlay and turns it over in his hand, noting the three-letter designation on its flank: HR1. He feeds them into the gun until the triangle of light at the top turns blue. Fully loaded. He pockets the rest, alongside any spare clips at the bottom of the case.

As if on cue, his visor emits a shrill beep:

_> 00:01:00_

One minute left.

Jack turns away from the empty case and makes his way back to the holo-screen, where he saves the search results to the data-pad drive and ejects the device, slipping it back into his jacket pocket. Then, he logs out of the system, removing any trace of his presence there.

He has no doubt that Helix Security will discover the missing rifle and report it back to the UN.

The nature of his search, on the other hand, is between him and those he is hunting.

“Time to move,” Jack mutters. His lips quirk as he eyes the heavy pulse rifle in his hands. He’s been itching to see how well it fires.

With fifteen seconds left on the clock, he gets the feeling he’s about to find out.

 _> 00:00:15_  
_> 00:00:14  
_ _> 00:00:13_

Jack exits the vault, leaving the door wide open behind him as he does. It’s by design; the first thing they’ll see when the system resets itself. If they’re any good—and Jack wagers they are—they’ll split the teams, sending one in to secure the vault and the other out to apprehend him.

It’s what he would do.

 _> 00:00:12_  
_> 00:00:11  
_ _> 00:00:10_

He breaks into a run in the hallway, gripping the pulse rifle in both hands.

The wide, grey walls streak past him; his heart begins to pound hard in his chest.

 _> 00:00:09_  
_> 00:00:08  
_ _> 00:00:07_

Jack throws his body into every movement, following the visor’s cues as it forges a path through the maze of corridors, back to familiar ground.

It feels like a small eternity before he spies the entrance to the hot lab, the biohazard sign taking pride of place above the door. 

 _> 00:00:06_  
_> 00:00:05  
__> 00:00:04_  

Jack skids to a halt in front of it, scans his access card at the panel by the door.

The red light blinks, processing the data.

_> 00:00:03_

He watches the numbers trickle down in the corner of his eye.

If he can get through this door before the system resets, it’ll give him time to plan his next move.

_> 00:00:02_

Still processing…

"C'mon," he urges. " _C'mon."_

_> 00:00:01_

The strip light on the panel turns green. Access granted.

_> 00:00:00_

The door slides open and Jack leaps through the opening with nano-seconds left on the clock.

New information appears below the six blinking zeroes as it slams shut behind him.

 _> System reset successful_  
_> Erasing file history (87%)_  
_> ERROR! Unable to locate file gm_01.exe_  
_> Error_505: File quarantined by base security system  
_ _> Retry? Y/N_

Frowning, he selects the N option. Additional lines appear after he makes his selection, but his eyes keep flickering back up the screen, honing in on those three words:  _‘Base security system’._

Breaching the vault must have tripped what was left of the Watchpoint’s security grid, he realizes with a touch of dread. He’d been afraid of this, and for good reason, because unless he wants to out himself to the UN by using the Strike Commander’s override code on the door, there’s no way he’s getting out through the hatch.

Seconds pass where the only sound he can hear is his own soft, exhale.

Time stretches like a rubber band pulled taut; Jack braces for the inevitable snap.

It doesn’t disappoint.

Alarms shatter the silence, a cacophony of sound that throws the world—and, by extension, Jack—into complete disarray. The bulbs above the door start to strobe, the noise itself like an electric hum in the air. Visceral. It sends a shiver down his spine, daring him to act.

Jack steps carefully through the plastic curtain in front of him, weapon at the ready. He skirts past the showers, the decontamination chambers, and proceeds into the lab proper, hyper-aware of the storage containers that litter the room. Most of them are powered down, like the ones he saw earlier, but there are few still active, particularly menacing in the crimson glow of the emergency lights.

He thinks about the experiments that must have taken place here and tries to recall the papers as they passed his desk: counter-agents, biotics and nanotech, studies in the effects of high-level radiation…

The serum makes him impervious to most forms of radiation, which, ironically, makes _this_ one of the safest places in the complex. But safe won’t get him out of here, and it’s only a matter of time before Helix Security track the use of his access card.

Gritting his teeth against the wail of the alarm, Jack calibrates the visor to prioritize exits that make use of his current position in the base. His program locks in on the closest route and superimposes the image onto his surroundings.

He follows it out of the confines of the lab, the door closing behind with a hiss.

Jack takes off into a sprint, putting every bit of his super-human speed behind the action. His short respite has given him a full tank to run with. He pushes hard against those limits, cutting the corner—

Right into a Helix Security drone.

 _Shit,_ Jack thinks, scrambling back. The drone emits a high-pitched sound, distinctive even against the backdrop of the alarm, followed by some kind of energy burst that rattles him to the core. It doesn’t fell him like he suspects it would a normal attacker, but the visor’s HUD—and, with it, his ticket out of here—winks out of existence. _Shit, shit, shit!_

Jack does the only thing he can think to do:

He raises his pulse rifle and shoots it out of the air.

He’s too late. Footsteps echo down the hall, signalling the arrival of the Helix Security team sent to bring him in. He makes a break for it, running hard for the elevator at the end of the hallway.

The security team slows upon entry, eyeing the remains of the drone and the pulse munitions on the floor. Then, their guns snap up as one, finding their target in the form of Jack’s retreating figure. He throws himself bodily into the elevator as they open fire, their moment of hesitation giving him just enough time to close the distance. Bullets zing across the far wall, biting into the metal plating inches away from his face. Jack tucks his body into the corner, out of their line of sight, and smashes his hand against the control panel, aiming for the ground floor.

The team approaches the elevator with a renewed wave of gunfire, but before they can reach him, the doors slide shut and the elevator whirs to life, ascending jerkily up the shaft.

Jack collapses against the bullet-ridden wall, breathing his relief into the small, box-like room.

Once he’s caught his breath, he directs his thoughts to the situation at hand.

Helix Security have the advantage. They outnumber him fifty-to-one, their teams know the lay of the land and they have the exits on lockdown.

Jack, on the other hand, is a solo act. No allies, no outside help and now, to top it all off, no visor. Whatever the drone hit him with drained it of its power—Jack can still see, but that’s about it.

It’s just him, his wits, and his gun.

He stares down at the pulse rifle, lost in thought; his eyes find the small triangle at the top of the gun, blue and at the ready.

An idea stirs in his head, gaining traction.

If he remembers correctly from his reconnaissance, only the top layer of the mountain consists of volcanic basalt. Everything beneath the cap is either shale or sandstone, two materials that are relatively soft in comparison. Moreover, the foundations of the base include several fissures of varying length—weak points in the rock, prone to erosion and decay. The locations of these fractures in a base as clandestine as this are something only high-ranking members of Overwatch would know—particularly, those who green-lit the construction in the first place.

Among the list of names: Strike Commander Jack Morrison.

He hadn't considered it before now purely on the grounds that it would cause irreparable structural damage to the Watchpoint. With the rest of the exits cordoned off, however, Jack has little choice in the matter—it’s either the base or the people inside it. People with no association to Overwatch, Talon or the UN. People who are, in the end, just doing their jobs.

Base it is.

*

Jack pulls himself into the elevator shaft via the escape hatch in the ceiling. The pulse rifle sits heavy on his back, but it’s a necessary weight; the climb ahead requires both hands.

He grips the steel rope on the sheave, attached to a pulley at the top of the shaft, and scrambles up it, hand over hand. The only light in the shaft comes from the elevator below him, parked on the lower ground floor. By the time his pursuers get through the mess he made of the control panel, Jack will be long gone, onto the second stage of his plan.

It takes no time at all to scale the shaft, stopping opposite the sealed door to the ground level. There’s a fifty yard difference between the lower ground and ground floors of the Watchpoint, the original concept being that everything important was sequestered deep below the earth—reinforced to withstand any outside threat to the base—while the superfluous equipment was kept toward the top.

Jack balances on the thin lip of the metal door-frame, the pads of his glove-clad fingers finding the seam and giving it an almighty pull. He settles his entire weight into opening the door and it surrenders with a dull, metallic groan, creating an opening just wide enough for him to squeeze through. On the other side, he withdraws the pulse rifle and pulls it across his chest. The path ahead of him is clear.

_Not for long._

He keeps low, moving fast, rifle up at all times.

The corridor housing the elevator gives way to a series of metal gangways, spanning the length of a truly massive cavern. Jack doesn’t stop to appreciate it, never even breaking his stride as he darts along the first gangway and into the office overseeing the cavern.

His entrance startles the guard standing by the window, who reaches for his earpiece to alert the others. He’s quick, but Jack’s quicker, and a well-placed punch to the throat stuns the man, who he then knocks out cold with the butt of his pulse rifle.

Dragging the guard’s body into the room proper, Jack throws him down on the desk-chair and wakes the computer with a brush of the man’s fingers against the screen. A quick check of the Watchpoint’s systems confirms his earlier assumption—entering the vault triggered a lockdown, which can only be revoked offsite by someone with the appropriate authority. Once that was Jack, or any of his top advisers. Now, it’s the UN.

Satisfied, he closes off the terminal, shuffling around the guard’s lax body to approach the window he was standing at when Jack entered.

His eyes rove the scene below. The cavern doubles as the Watchpoint’s main hangar bay, complete with a pair of thick, reinforced metal doors—also sealed in the lockdown—and an array of vehicles equipped to handle the snow outside. A crane designed to transport heavy pallets into storage sits at one corner of the room. Guards mill about, on alert, but for what they do not know.

Jack finds what he’s looking for, and everything else fades into the background.

On the far wall, cut deep into the rock, is a fissure.

It’s one of the larger ones, spanning from the floor of the cavern up towards the ceiling, the thickest point resting just above the metal gangway. There are a few, smaller fissures scattered throughout the massive room, but none are in such a prime position as this one.

It’s exactly what he needs.

Jack checks his pulse rifle, aware that things are about to get heated.

When the board appears green, he ducks out of the cover of the office in a half-crouch towards the corner of the gangway that leads to the fissure. Estimating that the nominal distance to fire would be at the mid-way mark, Jack braces himself. He breathes in, deeply—

—and dashes out into the open _._

It takes a moment for the first guard to spot him, but when they do things devolve into chaos. Shouts echo through the cavern as Helix Security personnel swarm in from all directions. They have no qualms about putting him down, opening fire as soon as they’re within shooting distance.

Only Jack isn’t paying attention to the oncoming barrage. He’s too busy sprinting across the catwalk, his heavy weapon raised in front of him. He aims down its sights at the fissure and pulls the trigger, releasing a short burst of pulse fire that smacks hard against the wall. Each round cracks the stone, confirming what he already knows: the cavern wall is vulnerable here.

Jack skids to a halt in the center of the gangway, pulse rifle primed and ready.

He pulls the second trigger. The symbol at the top flickers from blue to yellow and— _whoosh!_

Jack watches in awe as three rockets erupt from the canister at the base of the gun and lance through the air as one, careening down the gangway to slam—with force—into their intended target:

The fissure in the rock wall.

 _BOOM_.

The force of the blast echoes through Jack’s body like a live wire. The soft stone at the fissure is crushed to dust in an instant, the impact blowing the cleft wide open, giving way to the brisk, biting winds of the plateau outside and that’s all the confirmation Jack needs before he’s vaulting down the length of the metal catwalk, sprinting at full force for the newly-made hole in the side of the mountain, legs pumping hard beneath him as he runs.

He’s a few feet away from the edge when the first Helix Security team reaches the catwalk. Their bullets cut a path towards him, hot and fast.

Jack doesn’t stop, nor does he look back. Instead, he makes a running jump as he reaches the edge of the hole, throwing his entire weight into the action. At the apex of his jump, he turns, pulling the trigger on his assault rifle, letting lose another round of pulse fire.

The recoil jolts him back even further, hurtling him through the air.

The last thing he sees before he drops like a stone is the Helix team taking cover to avoid his fire.

Then he’s out, into the crisp, open air of Colorado’s Grand Mesa, knees bearing the brunt of the weight as he hits the snow-ridden floor. He sprints for the perimeter, away from the hole he made in the side of the base, gripping his pulse rifle with both hands.

A familiar chill creeps up the back of his neck. At first, he mistakes it for the wind it's so soft and gentle, a barely-there brush against his skin—until suddenly it lashes out, like a slap across the face, hot and biting.

He staggers, taken aback by the intensity of it, and the lack of a discernible foe _…_

A shot rings out across the mountainside, like hundreds before it.

Only this one is different, because the bullet _connects._

White-hot pain rips through Jack’s shoulder, dropping him in an instant. He crumples to the ground like a marionette whose strings have been cut and lands face-first in the snow, uncomprehending.

Jack’s been shot before; he has the scars to prove it. Par for the course when you’re a soldier, more so when you’ve fought in a war. He has never been taken down this easily, not by any ordinary bullet.

 _It’s no ordinary bullet,_ a voice in the back of his head piques up.

He’s inclined to agree. Whatever’s in the bullet is working fast. Or what he thinks is the bullet anyway. He isn’t entirely sure. Darkness skirts the edge of his vision—not the lull of oblivion at all but it’s polar opposite, hyper-reality. The creak of old bones, a stutter of breath in his throat; a world of jagged edges, open just for him. The smell of smoke and sulphur lies thick in his nose and on his tongue, like earlier.

Only this time, it doesn’t fade away. If anything, it gets worse, lashing out to suffuse him completely. He scrambles for some semblance of control but it spirals away from him, out of reach.

Jack's thoughts are frantic. 

He’s so close to escape, to victory, that he can almost taste it. Except he can’t exactly. It’s like his senses are being drained. By what, he doesn’t know, but whatever it is _hurts_. He hasn’t felt pain like this in years.

Not since—

The world tilts violently, derailing his train of thought. Jack can’t place where the sensation is coming from, or even where he’s felt it before, only that it’s there, slipping through the cracks of this old, scarred body, settling into his bones like it never really left. Maybe it didn’t.

Boots crunch in the snow, drawing near. Jack uses the very last of his strength—the last of his _control_ —to push himself up with his undamaged arm, the wounded one tucked beneath, cradling the pulse rifle.

 _Move,_ the voice in his head whispers. It’s dark and smooth, so unlike his own. _Do it now._

And he moves. Cleanly. It’s incomprehensible, really, how easily he gets to his feet.

Later, Jack won’t remember pulling himself up with a strength thought beyond him, raising the pulse rifle in a death-grip with both hands—impervious to the bullet in his shoulder—and  _firing_ on the approaching Helix Security team, all with an accuracy he shouldn’t possess in the wake his injury. The pulse fire hits its mark, strikes at hands, feet, arms and legs, hitting one man in the meat of his thigh, pulling him down to his knees hard. There are no kills, no life-threatening or serious injuries. It’s enough to slow them down, and that’s it.

He won’t remember turning on his heel and vaulting over the fence, dispersing the impact throughout his frame with a grace he once glimpsed in another, and always envied. Nor will he remember recovering his motorcycle from where it sits half-buried in the snow, punching the ignition and fleeing the scene.

In fact, everything after being hit has a faded, almost dream-like quality to it, like he’s watching it unfold through someone else’s eyes. Or, perhaps, none at all.

Reality curls at the edges, like a page being turned, taking the world—and Jack—along with it.

*

“Jack.”

The barely-there brush of fingers against his naked shoulder stirs Jack into a semiconscious state. He reaches out blindly for the hand that touches him, succeeds in holding them together. 

“ _Jack,_ ” the voice repeats. It’s deep and raspy and insistent.

A stranger’s voice, yet—oddly familiar.

“Mm,” Jack murmurs by way of reply. He’s comfortable, warm and not inclined to move anytime soon.

The stranger shifts as if to pull away, but Jack holds fast onto their hand. There’s a soft intake of breath in the air around him that could be a laugh, or a sigh. The sound of it makes him conscious of how much space there is between them, and how unacceptable that is all of a sudden. He pulls them against him, a solid line of warmth down the side of his body.

The form is distinctly male, all strong lines and planes. Jack notes this absently, as if unimportant. Which it is.

He doesn’t question who they are or why they’re there. It’s too early for that; his muscles still ache from the mission, a bone-deep exhaustion that pulls him further into the arms of sleep.

There can be no ill intent from this person—this _man_ whose presence is like an anchor by Jack’s side, whose heart matches his beat for beat. He breathes a sigh into Jack’s neck, stubble like sandpaper against the sensitive skin. His fingers are long and elegant where they twine through Jack’s, bearing the calluses of someone who uses his hands in his work—a laborer, perhaps, or a soldier like him.

The man whispers Jack’s name like a litany, over and over:

_Jack, Jack, Jack._

The only source of light when Jack opens his eyes is the dull glow of a wall-mounted holo-screen, set to mute in the early hours of the morning. His partner cuts a striking silhouette beside him, his strong arms bracketing Jack’s head. He sees the faint outline of thick, unruly curls, a strong nose and deep, dark eyes. Without his glasses, however, he can’t discern the details. Thinks that perhaps he doesn’t care to.

It’s intoxicating, the idea that the man beside him could be anybody. A friend, a foe.

A ghost.

“Jack,” he murmurs again, and this time the words carry an undercurrent of urgency to them, “ _Jack._ ”

A blistering pain cuts through Jack’s shoulder, sharp and stabbing. He tries to grasp at it, but he can’t. The man’s hands are twin bands around his wrists, pinning them by his sides like shackles, with all the strength and sturdiness of solid metal. He thrashes in an attempt to loosen the grip, and only succeeds to jar his shoulder even further. A fresh wave of pain strikes him, robs him of his breath.

The man, now his captor, is a blur above him, a black smudge in an already dark room. There’s no depth, no detail to the image, just the vague impression of a face looming over him. Menacing in its obscurity.

“ _Why,_ ” Jack breathes. “Why are you doing this?”

“It’s not me.”

The words are pitched low and soft, the first thing the man has said that _isn’t_  his name. Jack hardly notices—the world around him spins, heady from the pain.

“I don’t believe you,” he says.

“I know.”

Wistful. Melancholy. The man’s head bows, curls jostling, and the hands at Jack’s wrists shift ever so slightly, still holding fast but gentler now, the other’s thumbs running twin circles into his pulse points.

It shouldn’t relax him, but it does, leeching the flush of pain from beneath his skin, rendering it cold and numb. Bearable. Jack breathes easily for the first time in minutes.

“What did you do to me?” he asks, voice hushed.

“It’ll help,” the man says simply, matching his quiet tone. At Jack’s bemused silence, he adds, “With the pain.”

“Already has,” Jack grunts. The sound stutters in his mouth, like the words themselves are hesitating. “I don’t understand.”

Again. “I know.”

The hands around his wrists loosen, then pull away entirely. They reappear against the side of his face, framing it. A warm mouth slants over Jack’s lips, prising them gently apart. The kiss is soft and sweet; tender, like a wound. Jack buries his hands into the man’s hair, ignoring the protest in his shoulder, which feels far away all of a sudden. Diluted, like blood in water.

The man makes a noise against Jack’s lips, equal parts interested and distressed. It’s still so dark in the room, Jack can barely see the impression of his face a mere half-inch from his. He thinks the man’s eyes are brown, a distinct absence of light where his irises should be, but that could also be his arousal, pupils blown wide. They’re fixated on him, at any rate, watching Jack watch him.

He breaks the kiss.

“Better?” he asks, and Jack knows without asking that he’s referring to the pain in his shoulder, which is a speck on the horizon of his awareness right now. So far removed from him, it’s like it was never there.

“Yeah,” Jack says, licking his lips. The memory of the man’s mouth on his bears the faint taste of smoke.

Something in the air shifts with this realization, like a piece of an interlocking puzzle sliding home. The man’s presence around him flickers and—in the time it takes for Jack’s heartbeat to quicken—is gone, the very nature of smoke itself—elusive and ephemeral _._

He can’t find it in him to be upset or angry that the man has disappeared. He isn’t even confused, though he knows he should be. All that’s left is exhaustion, written into the fiber of his being.

 _Sleep,_ says that same voice, only this time the words aren’t spoken but thought.

And Jack can’t find it in him to argue. He shuts his eyes, darkness swallowing what little he can see. If he finds enough strength to focus on the world outside his body, he can still feel the impression of the man’s lips on his skin, the rub of stubble against his cheek. If he reaches out, in that moment, he can almost see him—a far-off figure in a far-off place. The crash of waves against the shore. The smell of marigolds and smoke. The dull thud of the man’s heart, still beating in time with Jack’s own.

Then it's gone.

*

Jack jolts awake in his hotel room at Cedaredge a full twenty-four hours after the assault on Grand Mesa, clad in nothing but his under-suit and feeling not unlike he’s been beaten around the head with a brick. He sits up slowly, muscles aching in protest, and looks for his glasses. They’re waiting for him on the bedside table and the world snaps into focus when he slips them on.

Like the aftermath of any big mission, the room looks like a bomb went off: pieces of his body armor litter the floor; his shoes are by the bed, still damp with dirt and snow, beside the messy ball of his black fatigues; his trademark jacket discarded over a chair on the other side of the room, the only article of clothing to make it onto the furniture. The tactical visor sits dismantled on the table, plugged into the wall-socket there. It blinks at him, the battery icon ebbing and flowing as it charges. 87%.

Jack gets to his feet and walks the room, picking up after himself as he goes.

He leaves the jacket to last, lifting it gingerly by the collar. He looks for the entry point of the bullet that struck him—and nearly put him down for good—but finds nothing. The leather is smooth and unbroken in his hands.

He rolls his shoulder, testing. It stings, pinpricks of pain an echo of how it felt when the bullet curved into him, piercing skin and muscle both.

It’s on par with other gunshot wounds he’s had in the past. Ever since the serum and SEP, his advanced healing factor has made hours out of what should be days, if not weeks, of recovery.

But it isn’t instantaneous. There’s a lingering discomfort after and it always leaves a mark. As a result, his body is riddled with scars of all shapes and sizes, from the little white lines crisscrossing his back to the deep, angry gorges in the skin below his ribs, discolored and patchy. There’s even the odd consistency of the healed burns on his face, courtesy of the explosion at Overwatch HQ.

Jack adds the motorcycle jacket to the growing pile in his arms. Then, one-handed, unearths his duffel bag from below the bed and dumps the load into it as one.

He turns on the holo for some background noise, thumbing through the channels until he reaches a sports replay—for _golf,_ of all things. The low drone of the announcer’s voice fills the room and something in Jack’s gut settles at the commonplace sound.

He takes a fresh pair of civvies and shuffles off to the bathroom, still testing the muscles in his shoulder for any lingering damage. There’s a twinge as he peels off his under-suit, but even that fades as he steps into the shower and cranks up the heat. The water feels heavenly against his skin, melting away the aches and pains of his aging body, and the lingering vestiges of his dream.

He steps out feeling renewed, invigorated. His assault on Watchpoint: Grand Mesa was, for the most part, a resounding success—he escaped with the pulse rifle and new information to boot. The next step is to decrypt the data and follow up on any leads.

Jack slings a towel around his waist and steps up to the mirror, replacing the glasses on his face. He stands up straight, inspecting his form. Then, with bated breath, he turns, so that the back of his shoulder is reflected in the mirror.

He’s disturbed, but not surprised, by what he finds.

Or, rather, what he doesn’t:

There's no mark.

Jack pauses to consider this, only for his train of thought to derail at the sudden mention of his name. Not Jack Morrison, but Soldier: 76.

He walks back into the bedroom. On the holo-screen, an Atlas News anchor speaks into the camera. Everything about her is sleek and professional, including her voice, which rings like a bell in Jack’s ears.

 _“We have received breaking news from Colorado this morning where a masked intruder has attacked a former Overwatch facility at Grand Mesa, injuring a number of private security personnel and stealing military equipment in the process,”_ the anchor says. _“According to our source, the break-in occurred at approximately 4AM local time yesterday at Watchpoint: Grand Mesa in Colorado’s Rocky Mountains, by an assailant who has now been confirmed as Soldier: 76._

_“76 has been linked to a string of attacks in recent weeks on various high-profile targets, all connected in some way to Overwatch—”_

A world map fills the screen, highlighting the various locations of the attacks they’ve connected to him. Jack’s impressed despite himself; four out of five are correct.

Then, as the anchor goes into detail of Overwatch’s recent history—or lack thereof—security footage appears across the screen, depicting a scene from the attack on Watchpoint: Grand Mesa. There he is in a grainy dull grey with his back turned to the camera, the 76 on his motorcycle jacket in full view. The tactical visor covers what can be seen of his face, to which Jack sighs. Small mercies.

He tunes back in to where the anchor is wrapping up the story.

_“—no official comment from the UN at present, leaving us with only one question: Who is Soldier: 76, and why is he targeting Overwatch? Up next is Overwatch expert Olympia Shaw, with what we believe is the answer.”_

Jack mutes the holo and folds himself into the chair by the bed, knees unsteady all of a sudden. The room is dead quiet, save the sound of his short, sharp breaths puncturing the air.

He smiles grimly. His eyes are on the screen, the pictures playing soundlessly across it, but his mind is elsewhere, running on overdrive. There’s only one thing he can think to say, and since the person he’d say it to is dead, Jack addresses the empty room instead:

“Who’s the boy-scout now, Gabriel?”

*

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> • Familiar faces appear next chapter, and Jack gets a clue.  
> • The next update is scheduled for Monday 16th, but I may post it on the weekend depending on how quickly I edit it!  
>   
> Thanks for reading.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> • Sorry for my tardiness. It's been a rough week. Please know that I appreciate each and every one of you.  
> • This part contains Jack getting beaten by the clue-bat and a heavy dose of angst. If this troubles you, please remember that whatever comes, this story _will_ have a hopeful ending. I promise.  
>   
> 

# iii: deep & loud

*

 _In the air—suspended here—_  
_With thousands of words we've spoken,_  
_Can I soar up through the clouds?_  
_Leave all of this behind…_

*

Time passes, as it is wont to do. Jack confronts the Los Muertos gang in Dorado, obliterates them off the map, and saves a little girl’s life in the process. He wrestles with the knowledge that he hesitated before he leapt for her—as if there was ever a choice—and tries to reconcile the act with the man he once was. The man that died on the charred floor of Watchpoint: Zurich. The man  _he_ replaced.

Only he's never stopped referring to himself as Jack, now, has he? He told Alejandra that old habits die hard; he didn’t tell her he’s living proof of that. A part of him may not have survived that night, but it’s still _him_.

For better or for worse, Jack Morrison lives.

He tries not to dwell on the past—the scar that isn’t and the soul-mark that is—but it proves difficult. The sweeping lines of that black tattoo feel like the only part of him that is tangible some days; on others, not at all. He wonders, on occasion, why he doesn’t pursue the mark like he has everything else to date, but the question answers itself in the end.

 _“They knew exactly how to get to me,_ ” a dead man whispers to a weary soldier, and that’s his answer right there. His truth. Jack can’t focus on himself, as one half or a whole, when there is still so much left undone by his actions. The truth of what happened to Overwatch—and how it was betrayed—is still out there, waiting to be discovered. That mission has to come first.

Everything else is secondary.

And yet, there are those stolen moments, those ‘what ifs’, before the onset of reality where Jack entertains the thought of what he’ll do once this vendetta—his own, private war—is done. If it will ever be done, or if he’ll even survive it. Inevitably, his mind returns to that hotel in Cedaredge, and his fever dream. To that feeling of companionship and completion. No other dream has held such sway over him, and he suspects none ever will. The entire experience was almost alien, in a way. Bizarre, and that’s saying something, considering exactly who he is and what he’s seen.

The questions themselves still remain, regardless of his decision not to pursue them. They hang, nebulous, in those stolen moments and the quiet spaces that his overarching mission cannot touch. Lying half-awake in the early hours of the morning, some hundred miles away from civilization, grit under his nails and in the corners of his eyes, wondering if it would really be so bad a thing—so selfish a request, to carve a moment of peace, just for himself and one other person. If he can even ask for that.

If he can ever _have_ it.

Then he wakes, and reality sets in, and it’s all he can do to brush the thoughts away like the grit in his eyes and get ready for another long, exhausting trek towards the truth, another battle in his theater of war. It’s all the same, one lead after another, differing names and dates, perhaps, but it’s the same, tired narrative. Another place, another enemy, another bullet.

Until one day, it isn’t.

* 

He’d like to think that he knew something was wrong the moment he entered the depot, but he wouldn’t be in this position if he did: surrounded on all sides by Talon, who've just gate-crashed his breaking and entering in a spectacularly violent fashion. Jack managed to get to cover when they breached the main server room, but he’s a sitting duck until he can get them to break formation.

They’ve sent men in to hack the terminal containing the logs, which include civilian identities of dozens of ex-Overwatch agents, as well as Blackwatch files on Talon’s operations back in the day. The latter may be outdated now, but is still a liability for the terrorist organisation, one Jack is happy to exploit. If any information on their long-term operations was disclosed in those files, it could ruin plans years in the making; it’s why he turned up here in the first place, and why Talon has, too.

Only the joke’s on them because the information they’re looking for is gone, stored on a data pad and erased at the source—stolen out from under them fifteen minutes earlier by Soldier: 76.

If they aren’t aware of it yet, they will be soon, which means Jack has to get out.

_Now._

There’s chatter among Talon’s ranks, presumably from their earpieces, and a pair of men peel away from the main group, heading towards the depot’s entrance. Jack waits a few seconds before he makes a break for it, sprinting out of cover and heading towards the hole in their defense.

He realizes, as the men behind him start firing on him, that he could use some backup on these missions. It isn’t the first time he’s thought as much, but his mind keeps returning to the fact that even if he did seek an ally, he wouldn’t know who to trust. He isn’t sure there’s anyone alive he _can_ trust, with both his mission and his identity. In the wrong hands, that information could be catastrophic.

It very likely will if Talon catches him, so Jack shakes the thought from his head, ducks for cover around the corner and fires off a round of helix rockets at the approaching enemy force. The projectiles rip clean through one of the men, and wound two of the others; he follows with a round of pulse fire that neutralizes them as well, then he’s gunning it down the corridor, heading for the exit.

Unlike the resistance he’s encountered at other facilities as of late, Jack _refuses_ to spare Talon. On the contrary, he’ll use everything in his arsenal to bring the organisation down, especially as it becomes more and more apparent to him how big a role they played in Overwatch’s demise. He’d suspected as much ever since Reyes name-dropped them that faithful night, but to have it confirmed as cold, hard fact is something else entirely. It shows Jack just how blind he was back then, not only to the plight of a friend but to Talon’s influence over Blackwatch as a whole.

Gabriel was right. Overwatch was corrupt, and his ignorance was at the heart of what was wrong.

It’s too late to make it up to the person he owes it to the most, but Jack isn’t deterred. Vengeance is as good a motivator as any, and he’s certainly not lacking in that department.

He stops in his tracks as he reaches a heavy, reinforced door with the old Overwatch logo on it that indicates the building’s armory. He ducks through one of the side entrances and beholds a room that looks more like an all-out warehouse than it does weapons storage, pressing his back flush against the wall by the door, waiting for the men tailing him to step through it.

They do, and Jack opens fire on them, gunning them down in a hail of pulse fire.

He kneels beside one of the corpses and plucks the radio from the man’s belt, checking the frequency. Once he’s found it, he adjusts the visor to mimic the signal. His ear-piece explodes with chatter as it intercepts the radio broadcast to Talon’s soldiers, who are now aware of his presence in the base. Their voices are fast and urgent over the transmission as they speak.

_“Soldier: 76 is still in the building—I repeat, 76 is still in the building.”_

_“Shit! He just took out another two of our men. Delta, do you copy?”_

A third voice answers the call, calmer than the rest. American accent. _“This is Delta team. We copy.”_

 _“What are our orders, sir?”_ asks one of the men, deferring to this new speaker, who Jack assumes is the leader of Delta team. He listens intently, in any case.

The leader replies:  _“The boss will be along shortly. He’d like this setback nipped in the bud. You have orders to engage the hostile and kill him. If by any chance he’s still alive when you find him, bring him to me.”_

_“Yessir.”_

The exchange ends. Jack’s interest is immediately piqued by the inclusion of the word ‘boss’ in their transmission. Little is known about Talon’s hierarchical structure—something he’s hoping the information on the data pad will shed some light on—and he’s certainly never heard of any bosses.

The position is relative to the speaker, however, and Jack is well aware that this is a tactical team he’s dealing with. Their boss could simply be the commander of the force, or the overseer of this particular mission. But until he can get back and look into the information received, it’s all hearsay, so he refocuses his attention to the mission at hand.

The armory is big, but not impossible to navigate once you know what you’re looking for; Jack finds a handful of pulse cartridges and, of all things, a biotic emitter.

Overwatch had begun circulation of the emitters to agents in the months leading up to the explosion at HQ. They’re handy in a fight, second only to having a healer at your back, and unlike his syringes, they can heal a full team of people. He’d prescribed them frequently in the field, even carried a few himself. Superfluous for only one man, but if he’s serious about finding a team…

Jack pockets the emitter with the cartridges and darts across the armory towards the southernmost exit, careful to note the enemy’s position in the peripheral view. Talon have divvied up their forces in order to hold the server room and search for him at the same time. Once they realize the data is gone and that _he_ has the only copy, that’s when they’ll be gunning for him. All of this is child’s play in comparison to the hell they’ll rain down around him then.

Jack slams the butt of his rifle into the head of an unsuspecting Talon agent who is guarding the door. The agent’s partner raises their pistol to fire, but Jack’s in his face before they can even pull the trigger, twisting their wrist at an unnatural angle, struggling for control of the weapon.

Suddenly, the gun goes off, the sound slicing the air between them. It hits the agent square in the neck, shattering their throat-mic, only the bullet doesn’t stop there. Blood trickles out of the wound as the agent falls hard to their knees, staring up at him, mouth agape.

 _Slow way to die,_ rasps a voice in the back of his head. Jack frowns behind the face-mask. It almost sounds… amused. He feels anything but, yet the logic is sound. It _is_ a slow way to die.

He wrenches the pistol fully out of the agent’s now-slack grip, raises it to their head and fires again, killing them in an instant. Discarding the gun, he steps over the corpse and continues down the hall.

There’s a larger collection of agents around the south-side of the building, guarding what he presumes is another exit. He scans the area behind him, sees the heat signature of another Talon force closing the distance behind him with at least double the men.

He’ll have to take his chances.

Loading a new clip into his pulse rifle, Jack takes off in another sprint. He slides into cover behind a large crate in the next room, allowing him full view of the exit and the enemy force in front of it. He has a few minutes before the team behind him come into play, so he takes time to plan his shots.

He’s getting ready to vault over the crate when it happens.

Suddenly, and without warning, the door opens and black smoke flows through it like a whirlwind. Jack starts in shock, and is immediately taken by the realization that the agents surrounding the exit are _not_.

His mind flits through the possibilities but that train of thought is brutally derailed by the sight in front of him. He watches on in awe as the smoke coalesces into a solid shape, a living shadow whose very presence defies the light in the room. It grows depth and detail, until it isn’t a shadow at all but a _man_ , dressed in all black, a cowl concealing his face from view.

Jack’s never seen anything like it, not in all his years at war, and yet—there’s something familiar about the man, a likeness that he can’t quite place. As it stands, all he can see from his vantage point is the broad line of the man’s back, clad in form-fitting black leather.

Talon’s forces speak to him in a low, urgent tone. Jack strains to hear what they are saying, but only manages to capture a few fragmented words of the conversation.

_“—mining the data… two confirmed casualties… Soldier: 76… evaded capture—”_

The man turns around to face the room at large, motioning towards the archway and the hall beyond, presumably giving orders to the men.

Jack doesn’t hear him speak. Doesn’t hear anything at all, in fact, over the harsh ringing in his ears. The world around him is wrenched into silence barring the sound, the throb of his heart _pounding_ in his head like rain on concrete. Unrelenting. Cleansing.

It isn’t just an absence of sound, either, but an absence of everything as time itself shudders to a stop for Jack, eyes fixated on a single point in his field of vision, clear as crystal through the scope of his visor. It’s unmistakable, really, and yet he can’t bring himself to believe in what he is seeing. It’s a hallucination, a vision, a trick. Talon has him, their hands are all over him, they have to be _,_ because there’s no way. There’s just no way he’s really here. Except he is.

He is, and that’s _it,_ right there, covering the man’s face. His soul-mark _._

It’s a mask. Of course it is, why wouldn’t it be? He used the word enough to describe it, after all. It’s there in all its haunting glory—bone-white, black slits for eyes, swooping concave lines—the colors of his tattoo reversed. It fits the face that wears it perfectly, no inkling of the features beneath.

Jack wonders, for an instant, what that face looks like. If there even is one, or if it’s just smoke in the approximation of a man. A living shadow.

_A living shadow._

Something shifts beneath Jack’s skin and just like that he can feel it. The black smoke, licking around him like in his dreams, dancing in the boundary of his vision, taunting him, and it _all makes sense._

They weren’t dreams at all, they were this.

 _Him_.

His heart is absolutely _thundering_  now, rain darkening to a storm, hail like bullets bruising the skin, drilling to the very core of him; the hollows of his bones, that staccato beat. All that he is and ever was in a single sound—throbbing in his temples, ricocheting in his rib-cage. _Thud. Thud. Thud._

He’s convinced they can hear him, the man especially. The inexorable link between them has never felt stronger. Clearer. Jack’s driven by the urge to know him, inside and out, to reveal himself in turn, as dangerous as it will surely be. The smoke grows thicker around him, like a fog. Equal parts dread and thrill to the thought:  _have I been discovered?_

But it appears only he can see the smoke this time, black tendrils that wrap themselves around his wrists and through the gaps in his fingers, tickling the trigger of the pulse rifle. Reality trickles back to him as he stares hard at the gun in his hand. He can’t stay here. He _can’t._

Even if this man is his soulmate—and he is, god, _he is._ Jack can feel it—he’s still Talon, or at least aligned with them. They’re on opposing sides in this fight, which doesn’t bode well for any sort of connection.

He needs more data—he needs to _know_ him—but not now and not in this place.

It’s time to go.

Jack reverts to the part of himself hidden deep below the surface, the part that survived the SEP, Omnic Crisis and Strike Command; the part of him that propelled his body, bruised and bloodied, out of the ruins of a place he once called home. Instantly, the ringing in his ears disappears, his heartbeat falling back to normal parameters. The howling wind and intermittent tremors of the storm in Jack’s mind slow along with it, allowing for a moment to gather his thoughts unencumbered.

“Sir,” says the Talon agent closest to the man in the mask. “Beta has just reported in—the data is gone. The vigilante must have erased the drive.”

The man releases a guttural growl, the sound of which ripples down Jack’s spine. He starts immediately for the archway, near where Jack is hidden. If he gets too close, he’ll see him for sure.

There’s no other choice, then.

Jack hits the button on the side of his visor, tethering it to the pulse rifle in his hands. A wide targeting band fills his vision, highlighting the enemy—the man included. Jack leaps from cover with his gun up and already firing, the visor aiming for him, each shot a near-perfect hit.

He aims a round of helix rockets at the men stationed near the still-open exit, forcing them to scatter. Before they can mobilize further, he’s halfway across the room, sprinting at full speed towards the door. He pushes every modicum of energy he has into his legs, not stopping for even a second. Not daring to.

Jack runs right past the man, who slows at the sight of him, but if he’s as good as Jack suspects he is—possibly better—he won’t be deterred for long.

He’s right, for as soon as he’s out through the door, hitting the apex of the stairs and taking them two at a time, Talon’s return fire is hot on his heels.

But it’s too late for them. Jack clears the building and all but throws himself at his motorcycle, gunning the engine and firing blindly behind him with the pulse rifle. By the time they reach their vehicles and give chase, he’ll be long gone.

Jack shoots off the mark, riding one-handed, still firing back at the approaching Talon force. When he’s cleared enough space between them, he slides the rifle into his lap and grips the handles of his bike with both hands, slamming down on the accelerator hard.

The motorcycle picks up speed, peeling away from the depot, which grows smaller in his mirrors.

He doesn’t stop driving until he’s well into the next town. Even then, he doesn’t look back once.

There’s a feeling he can’t shake. It follows him all the way back to his base of operations, where he peels off his clothing and makes a beeline for the shower, turning the water up so hot it’s scalding.

He did exactly what he set out to do, got the data and threw one back at Talon to boot.

So why does he feel like he just lost?

* 

The reality of the situation doesn’t set in until early next morning, staring at himself in the mirror, head as steam-touched as the room around him. His eyes find his soul-mark in the reflection, the man’s mask immortalized on his skin in bold strokes of jet-black ink, dark and permanent. Like a shadow, he thinks.

It’s fitting.

Shock is long gone from his mind, compartmentalized. In its place is an ache, bone-deep and weary.

Despite the serum, Jack feels his age—he feels _tired._

It’s all he has left. Anything else he might have felt—anger, sadness, or, worst of all, _hope_ —cannot withstand the events of the past five years, the ghosts that clamber and crawl along his back, whispering failure after failure in his ear, demanding penance for his sins.

Whatever he might have thought in passing is long gone today; the cold light streaming through the window illuminates the details of his sorry little life on the run. It’s all he has anymore—this pursuit for answers, for _retribution._ Talon took everything from him. Nothing will stop him from returning the favor.

Not even fate.

Jack slips on the shirt in his hands. The tattoo disappears from view entirely, swallowed by the fabric of his sleeve, breaking its sway over him.

A cursory glance at the clock has him crunching numbers in his head, cross-referencing time zones. It’s still too early to make the call to Zurich, so he works on cracking the data drive instead. His software has been running all night, chewing through the files, but there’s something comforting about handling the code himself. It soothes the problem-solver in him, allows for single-minded focus on the task at hand. All his concerns fall to the wayside as he works, one after the other after the other.

For all that he enjoys it, it’s a slow process. He wishes—not for the first time—that he’d paid more attention to what Gabriel had been trying to teach him all those years ago. There are shortcuts for at least half of what he is doing, but he can’t remember a single one.

Rather, he remembers the warmth, the barest hint of a smile from a man who was once Jack’s best friend, his comrade-in-arms, who is now neither and never will be again.

Jack swallows as if the single act could alleviate him of the pain that accompanies those particular thoughts. It doesn’t, but it _does_ allow him to turn his focus inward. He isn’t blind to the fact that he’s been thinking about Reyes more these days. More than usual, at least. It’s difficult not to, when all roads lead back to that terrible night when the world literally went up in flames.

He’s read the theories—including the UN’s findings on the subject—that state a variety of different things, most outlandish being that Gabriel must have planned this somehow, but Jack doesn’t believe that for an instant. If he’d wanted to blow up the base, he would have just done it. Instead, he broke formation to find Jack, who he tried to put down only _couldn’t_. If this was his plan—to bring the base down around them—why did he think the only other option to killing Jack was putting a gun to his own head?

No. _No_.

It doesn’t make sense, any of it, and Jack needs it to make sense.

It’s the only way he can move on, whatever that might mean for him.

Jack decrypts file after file with no shortcuts, working long into the day until at last it’s done. He boots up a search algorithm to compile the results based on keywords he’s fed into the system and, while it runs, makes a video-call. Einarsson answers on the second ring, exhausted but smiling.

“Soldier,” he says by way of greeting. “You look awful.”

Jack snorts.

“And you’re the picture of beauty, doc.”

Einarsson’s smile widens, blue eyes glittering in the light of the holo-screen. “I try,” he says with a shrug. “You’ve caught me at a good time, actually. I’ve just stepped off rotation.” He pauses, not in hesitation but in thought. “It’s good to see you, Jack.”

Jack smiles, wanly. “You too, Markus. It’s been too long.”

“That it has,” Einarsson agrees, “but then, you’ve been busy, haven’t you? Imagine my surprise when I saw the prototype I helped build on national television! In the hands of a vigilante, no less.” He chuckles. “I was lucky I was sitting down.”

“I’ve got something you might be interested in,” Jack says, cutting to the chase. The doctor’s time is valuable, as is his expertise. He lifts the biotic emitter up in view of the camera, watching the other man’s eyes blaze in interest as he puts two and two together.

“Classified prototype,” he says, then looks to Jack. “Military or Overwatch?”

“Overwatch,” Jack confirms. “I found it in the armory of an abandoned depot. They started giving these out to teams before the fall—the energy projector restores health to anyone within the biotic field.”

Einarsson slips on his glasses. “Fascinating.”

After turning the device around in a circular motion in front of the camera, Jack places the emitter on the scanner at his side. Instantly, the scanner starts communicating with his laptop and, to the right of their video call, a program opens, displaying the scan’s progress. Jack makes it visible to Einarsson.

“Replicating it as it is will no doubt call unwanted attention to you when it’s brought to the board, but I’m hoping there’s something here you can use.”

“I’m sure there is,” Einarsson muses, excitement evident in his voice. He gives the emitter one last, lingering look before minimizing the screen on his end. Then, his eyes are on Jack, the full weight of his attention blanketing him, heavy and warm. “What about you, Jack?”

Jack huffs. “What about me, doc?”

Einarsson pins him with a glance, the kind that makes Jack wonder if he’s looking _at_ him or _through_ him.

“Have you found what you’re looking for?”

He's been asking himself that same question for the last day and a half, since he laid eyes on a mask that matched his soul-mark and felt a pull unlike any he’s ever felt before.

“I’m not sure I know what that is anymore,” Jack admits.

Exhaustion bleeds through the cracks in his facade, his shoulders slumping. He sees the doctor’s brow furrow in concern.

“I’m searching the data from the depot now,” he explains, and clicks through to the other screen, where the progress bar has hit the half-way mark. “Whoever's responsible for what happened buried the information deep. I’ve got nothing concrete, only whispers. I’m running off a gut feeling here—”

“…and you don’t know if that’s enough?”

Jack nods wearily, watches the other man gather his thoughts.

He sighs. “I don’t want to sound like a broken record here, Jack, but you need help on this. There has to be someone— _anyone_ —that can take some of the slack off you.”

Jack raises a hand to silence him, a smile playing on his lips.

“Easy doc. I happen to agree with you, which is why I went after the information.” At Einarsson’s confused look, he clarifies, “It contains information on ex-Overwatch agents, including their last known locations and civilian identity records. If Talon got their hands on this, it would make a disaster out of many people’s lives, but it wasn’t the only reason I took it.”

Einarsson’s eyes widen in realization. “You’re going after them yourself, to see if they’ll join you.”

“Thinking about it,” Jack says, which is as close to an affirmative as he’ll get.

“Will you tell them who you are?”

“That depends.”

“On what?”

“On who _they_ are.”

Einarsson inclines his head. “That’s fair,” he says. “I won’t lie to you, Jack. Knowing someone out there has your back will be a load off my mind.” The doctor fixes him with a wry smile. “I didn’t patch you up all those years ago for you to go and get yourself killed in some back-alley as a faceless vigilante.”

Jack doesn’t tell him that that’s exactly what almost happened in Dorado a few months ago.

Instead, he smiles and says, “I know.”

They exchange the usual updates, idle chatter and shop-talk. Eventually, Einarsson leaves to study the biotic emitter—which he’ll undoubtedly try to reverse-engineer, if only for his use—and Jack sifts through the search results, looking for a lead.

It isn’t long before he finds one.

There have been several sightings of a masked bounty hunter operating out of Egypt, code-name Shrike. Intelligence networks suggest that this Shrike character has had affiliations with Overwatch in the past, the hallmark of advanced military training evident in their marksmanship.

Further information from this source is vague, suggesting only that Shrike has been sabotaging Talon for some time—which is an immediate tick in Jack’s book—and that their chosen weapon is a sniper rifle.

He finds another reference to Shrike in the surveillance feeds he set up to monitor Talon. He’s unable to salvage the original audio, so he converts the communications intercept into text. Interestingly, the transcript is dated only a few days prior, suggesting Talon’s plans for Shrike are imminent:

> _**TRANS INTERCEPT** _  
>  _**SAT BT-5001/08.10.78-1009**_  
>  _**A44-TEXT TRANSMISSION  
>  ****FROM:** Unknown Source/Delaware (USA)_  
>  _**TO:** Unknown Destination, Dorado (MEX)_
> 
> _**> VOICE 1 (REAPER): ** All targets eliminated and data retrieved. En route to Maryland for final data extraction. Immediate departure to Egypt thereafter. Will arrive in Giza at 0600 local time, 14 August._
> 
> _**> VOICE 1 (REAPER): ** Is the next stage ready?_
> 
> _**> VOICE 2 (MEX): ** It is. Hakim has been informed of your impending arrival in Giza. He is being most co-operative, albeit for a price. We have set up surveillance to your specifications and will deploy the trap._
> 
> _**> VOICE 1 (REAPER): ** Affirmative. What news of Shrike?_
> 
> _**> VOICE 2 (MEX): ** Sightings reported in Luxor indicate that Shrike is active in the region. Additional orders are as follows: Continue in utmost secrecy. Liaise with Hakim and use his forces where required. We do not want to attract too much attention. This cannot be traced back to us._
> 
> _**> VOICE 1 (REAPER): ** Consider it done._

It’s a solid lead, giving Jack the option to not only find and warn Shrike—and, if possible, recruit them—but sabotage Talon’s plans in the process. And yet, something about the transmission strikes him as odd. A single line, innocuous but for the context in which it is presented.

The transmission was dated a day before his break in at the depot, which was located in—

“Maryland, USA,” Jack murmurs. His eyes fly back to that line near the top of the transcript. He repeats, “‘En route to Maryland for final data extraction.’” He blinks. “Holy shit.”

He brings up another search bar, punches in the name of the first speaker,  _Reaper_. He filters for all results pertaining to Overwatch, Talon or both and re-reads the transcript word-for-word while it loads. The beginnings of a plan have formulated in his mind by the time the program returns the results.

Apart from rumors and dubious sources, only one result holds any merit: CCTV footage from a Talon incursion late last year. They got sloppy with clean-up, erased the footage locally but forgot to check if it had been uploaded elsewhere.

Which it had.

Jack presses play on the video. He watches as Talon forces enter the compound, weapons poised in front of them, ready to strike. They’re met by resistance from the building’s security team and a firefight ensues. Security actually appear to be pushing the Talon insurgents back until suddenly, a figure appears that wasn’t there before. Radio chatter confirms what Jack already knows:

This is Reaper.

The figure coalesces in the nano-seconds between frames. One moment, there’s nothing but emptiness in the middle of the room. In the next, he’s there, twin guns raised in an X-shape in front of him.

Jack recognizes him instantly, both the harsh cut of his coat and the mask obscuring his features. It’s him, the man from the depot. This man—this _Reaper_ —is, according to some twisted sense of fate, Jack’s soulmate. He bursts forth from black tendrils of smoke, which Jack considers all the more fearsome in person. In the footage, it looks more akin to a special effect than it does reality.

If he hadn’t seen it for himself, he isn’t sure he’d believe the video evidence. As it stands, he has, and so his gaze is riveted on the black-clad figure as he all but _tears_ through the enemy security team, using everything in his arsenal, not only the guns. At one point, he vanishes completely, only to reappear in a flanking position behind enemy lines. He dispatches the guards with practiced ease, balancing the playing field and taking back the ground the building’s security team had won against Talon.

Whenever he’s hit, he bounces back almost immediately. With the added ability to turn into smoke at will, Jack finds it difficult to fathom how one would stop him. If they even could.

He can’t help but be impressed by Reaper’s skill-set, reminding himself on more than one occasion that the man is very much a terrorist—or, at the very least, a mercenary in league with terrorists. If the evidence is to be believed, he’s a ruthless, remorseless killer with no one allegiance and no apparent motive. It isn’t surprising to Jack that his identity is also a secret, sequestered away behind the mask.

His curiosity satisfied, Jack turns his focus back to the task at hand:

Shrike.

Similar to the search for Reaper, Jack digs up anything and everything he can about Shrike. There isn’t much more to go on, apart from a few eye-witness testimonies who confirm several facts about the bounty hunter that were otherwise up in the air. Namely, that Shrike is a woman, fluent in Arabic and estimated to be between fifty-five and sixty years of age. She wields a long-barreled prototype sniper rifle and is an exceptional shot. So far, her movements have been consistent with Talon activity in the area, and there is a bounty on her head for an exorbitant amount of money, just like Jack.

The more he learns about her, the stranger he feels about the entire situation, like his mind is trying to tell him something but the moment he pays attention to it, it’s gone. Like a word on the tip of his tongue, he can’t quite fathom what it is. It’s incredibly frustrating, so Jack elects to bury it for now, relying instead on what he _can_ hear, which is his gut telling him to act.

Time to go to Giza.

*

It’s a mistake.

*

“ _Where is he?_ ” Jack demands, a thread of panic in his voice.

The man, one of Hakim’s nameless thugs, doesn’t answer, still reeling from the blow that sent him sprawling. Jack’s already in motion, scanning the horizon with his tactical visor, looking for something— _anything_ —that will lend credence to the impossible, for that’s exactly what this is. _Impossible._

“Right here, Jack.”

He doesn’t feel the bullet, or the pain that follows its entry. He doesn’t feel the impact as he hits the ground, hand curling around the newly-made wound in his side, wet and slippery with blood.

He doesn’t even feel surprise at the sight of Reaper materializing behind him, twin shotguns in his hands.

He just feels numb.

“Always rushing in,” Reaper is saying—no, _taunting_. He steps closer to where Jack twitches in the dirt, gasping for air he can’t seem to breathe. “I know your every move before you even think it,” he says. “Always have.” Another step. “Always will.” Another.

Jack shakes. From what, he doesn’t know.

He can’t feel a thing.

Reaper stops walking. He knows because the sound of his heavy boots have ceased pounding against the floor. “I’ve been looking for you since Switzerland,” he continues. “Knew it’d take more than that to kill you. Now here you are.” Jack closes his eyes, manages a thin, wispy breath. It isn’t enough.

“This is how it should have been.”

An unearthly howl ripples through Jack’s mind and all at once, every feeling comes flooding back to him, like a tsunami shattering the shore. His entire body spasms in pain, from gunshot and revelation both.

It’s unbearable.

_'It’s always been you.'_

The words have never felt more apt than in this precise moment, his life hanging in the balance at the mercy of the one who spoke them all those years ago.

Jack closes his eyes, preparing for the end.

It doesn’t come.

Reaper lets out a sudden grunt of pain, as if he’s been hit. Jack forces himself to turn around and face the scene behind him, and it’s the hardest thing he’s ever had to do, because the connection between voice and man that had been tenuous at best is now an absolute.

A round sizzles towards him and strikes him hard in the shoulder. He braces for another wave of pain, only he’s flooded with warmth instead. He looks down at his own hand, startled by the equilibrium he feels. “The pain,” he murmurs. “It’s gone?”

From somewhere high above him, a voice yells, “Get in there, Jack!”

So he does.

Spurred on by something deep and dark in the hollow of his bones, Jack throws himself bodily at the still-confused figure looming over him. They hit the ground hard, tumbling, only Jack gets the upper hand and punches Reaper in the side of the face. He can’t control the anger that volleys him forward, into the other man’s space, landing hit after hit. The tsunami destroys all it touches, including him.

_Including him._

Reaper struggles against Jack’s next blow, pivoting away at the very last second, getting to his feet with an elegance that belies his wounds. Next to him, Jack feels old and clumsy. He’s too slow in parrying the next blow, which Reaper lands hard against Jack’s side, the exact place he’d shot him only minutes ago.

Jack groans, a noise of pure pain, and staggers back.

“You—”

A bullet zings off the smooth metal of Reaper’s arm guard. He lands the punch square in Jack’s chest, forcing him back and to the ground, and in a whirlwind of black smoke he’s gone, closing the distance between him and the gate—or, more precisely, the shadowed figure shooting atop it with a long-barreled sniper rifle, face exposed to the bruising, Egyptian heat.

Shrike.

 _Ana,_ Jack thinks. It’s the lesser of the two revelations that have shaken his foundations today. In a way, he knew the moment he read the data. There’s nobody else it could have been but her.

Reaper, on the other hand—

He slams the door shut to that particular thought, throwing all his weight behind it to keep it closed.

Above him, the two dark-clad figures of Reaper and Shrike battle for control of the gate. He can hear the echo of that low and rasping voice over the radio, and again in the air around him.

“Hakim’s been trying to draw out the one who’s been sabotaging our operations. I never expected it to be you—a real ghost.” Reaper leaps back to deflect Ana’s kick. “Not to mention _him._ Guess we old soldiers are hard to kill, but I should have known.” He laughs darkly. “You always took _his_ side.”

Jack flinches, but Shrike does not. She lashes out, catches Reaper by the throat and _hurtles_ them down to the ground. Though he’s but a bystander in this fight, Jack feels the impact as if he was right in the fray, pain lancing down his back for an evanescent second before it’s gone.

Reaper’s body cushions Ana in the fall, allowing her to gain the upper-hand once more. She reaches out, gloved fingers closing around Reaper’s mask, and pulls.

The mask comes away easily. From his vantage point, Jack can’t see what’s beneath, but he has a perfect line of sight at Ana’s face, which twists from one extreme to the other.

“What _happened_ to you?” she gasps in wide-eyed and open-mouthed shock. There’s something else there, too, lingering in her voice. It sounds a lot like terror.

“ _He_ did this to me, Ana,” replies Reaper, equal parts rage and pain. He begins to dissipate at the edges, becoming smoke. “ _They_ left me to become this thing.”

“Gabriel…”

But he wasn’t finished.

“They left you to die.” The mask clatters to the floor, forgotten. “They left me to suffer.”

The lines and planes of Reaper’s body collapse in on themselves, evaporating into the air, but not before echoing his final words:

“Never forget that.”

Then he’s gone, the only evidence he was ever there at all the mask, which lies face down in the dirt by Ana’s side, and the echo of his voice in Jack’s ears, still rattling him to the core.

The first thought Jack has in this new reality is: _I don’t want to be here and I definitely don’t want to have this conversation._ But he has to, because he chose this. He chose to come here, and he chose her.

He mutters off something about believing she was going to kill him, to which Ana tells him he better have a good reason for ruining her plans. Jack pays the bare minimum of attention, fingers closing around his visor, pulling it free. He feels utterly overwhelmed by everything that has just happened, teetering on the edge of a breakdown. His breath comes out in short, sharp pants. The world around him is a blur.

He realizes a few seconds in that she’s waiting for an answer, so he kneels in front of her and says, “I was looking for you. I thought you were dead, Ana.”

She bristles. “Just like the world thought you were,” she shoots back. “But I saw the news reports. You’re so hard-headed, you wouldn’t know how to die. All the same, you’re lucky to be alive.”

She doesn’t know how lucky, he thinks, but that isn’t what she needs to hear, so it isn’t what he says. He can’t even remember what he _does_ say, he thinks it might be a joke, only it skirts too close to before—to close to _him—_ and he can’t think about that right now. Or ever.

“This is my war, Ana,” Jack says with a sigh, “and you’ve given it up, or else you’d have told me you were still alive.” He stares down at his feet. The numbness has returned with terrifying force, trickling over him. He’s so very, very tired, and it shows.

Ana’s voice sounds the way Jack feels. “You don’t know what I’ve been through, Jack. I’d failed everyone. I decided it would be better if I was just a ghost.” She chuckles, though there is little humor to the sound. “But I realized even a ghost can protect those who need it.”

She straightens, standing above him but not over him. By his side, like she used to be.

He pushes away the thought that there used to be someone else there, too—on his right the way Ana was on his left. _Stop it,_ he demands, and the two words are like acid, eating away at his composure. Jack doesn’t know what will happen once it’s gone, and he isn’t eager to find out.

“I don’t care about your war, but I do care about you,” Ana says, and her words are stoic but genuine. She’s every bit the woman he remembers; the mother and the warrior both. “You _need_ me, Jack. You need someone to watch your back.”

Unbidden, he feels a smile curl his lips. “And here I thought I was supposed to be recruiting you.” He pulls himself to his feet, feeling every bit of his age when he stands. “We should get moving.”

“Just tell me one thing,” Ana asks of him.

“What are you going to do when the fighting’s over?”

The question makes his head spin and his heart leap to his throat. For the first time since they’d begun, he feels every bit of the heat in the air, an oppressive blanket across his skin.

He shuts his eyes and it’s a mistake, like everything else about today—everything else but Ana, the silent sentinel at his side. Images burst to life behind his eyelids: the CCTV footage of Reaper appearing in a cloud of smoke; sprinting past his real-life counterpart at the depot, who did not attempt to take up arms against him; hands reaching for him in a dream, face obscured by his failing vision, easing the pain of a bullet-that-wasn’t; and, finally, the look on Gabriel Reyes’ face in the seconds before the explosion, the sharp lines of his anger and grief tempered by something softer. _It’s always been you,_ he’d said.

He doesn’t think that’s true, anymore.

He opens his eyes, looks at her from over his shoulder, an image with no depth, and says: “I’m a soldier, Ana. Our war’s never over.”

Her mouth twists in discontent, but she can’t find the lie because there isn’t one. Not exactly. For a moment he'd allowed himself to hope for something more, but that moment is gone. All he has is the mission, now. The mission, and her.

Sensing this, she remains silent. Jack slips on his visor and the world around him snaps into perfect focus.

He turns to leave, takes a step, only for his feet to come down on something hard. He shifts back to see what it is, and feels something curl, hard and heavy, in the pit of his stomach.

Jack bends down to pick up the mask, aware that he is balancing on a knife’s edge.

Ana’s voice rings out, concerned. “Jack?”

“Before you come with me,” he begins, the words all but bursting from him. He tightens his grip on the mask in his hand, trying not to use it as an anchor and failing. “There’s something you need to know.”

“What’s that?” she asks, taking a careful and measured step towards him, as if he were a horse easily spooked. In that moment, he feels like he is. Reaper’s words to her repeat in his head, over and over again, with all the pain and anger he must have felt when he spoke them. _He did this to me._

The only thing on Jack’s mind now is a question that rings painful in the cavern of his chest. Two words that could either make or break him, depending on the answer:

_Did I?_

“Oh god,” Jack breathes, and he watches Ana’s face fall with the burden of her worry, just as his falls with the burden of his grief. Because the answer to that question is _yes._ The words come out quickly now, so quickly he almost chokes on them. “He was right, Ana. Gabriel was right. _I did this to him_ —” He stutters. “I left him there, in the ruins of that place, alone.

“I looked for him, I did, but it wasn’t enough, _clearly_. I thought he was dead, I was _so sure_ he was, I’ve mourned him in a thousand different ways and never once entertained the thought that he could still be out there. That he survived,” he gasps, drawing a breath that simultaneously fills and knocks the wind right out of him. It doesn’t make sense. None of this makes sense.

He looks up at Ana, whose face is rendered back at him in perfect detail through the visor’s filters. Ana, who looks at him like her heart is breaking, sadness and anguish twisting her beautiful and weathered features. Ana, who says “oh, Jack” like those two words convey everything she wishes to say to him, and they do. It’s ‘ _I’m sorry’_ and _‘what have you gotten yourself into?’_ and ‘ _how can I help?’_.

“He’s my soulmate, Ana,” Jack whispers, words carrying in the eerie silence that surrounds them. It’s the first time he’s said the words—the first time he’s thought them, even. “And I abandoned him.”

She closes the distance between them and pulls Jack into a tight hug, the way she did when he received word all those years ago that his father had died, and again on the farm, when he’d pulled that old motorcycle jacket out from his wardrobe and finally broke down into mere shards of a man.

He doesn’t cry this time, not a single tear. He shed them all long ago, in a place he’d once called home, the ashes of the dead thick in his mouth. He’d managed to keep moving despite the pain he he’d cradled to his chest, until he could pretend that it wasn’t there, that it no longer controlled him, when the truth is it never stopped. No, the fallout to this is a lot worse than a physical manifestation of his grief—it goes beyond that, hewing the surface of his very soul, in a way that may never heal.

In Ana’s arms, Jack can no longer lie, nor can he convince himself that everything is fine.

It’s not.

*

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> • Dialogue from the final scene has been lifted from the Old Soldiers comic, available [here](https://comic.playoverwatch.com/en-us/ana-old-soldiers). I knew when it was published that I wanted to acknowledge it in some way. I hope I've done it justice.  
> • Next chapter: Ana convinces Jack to make some changes— _big ones_ —and the battle becomes personal for them both.  
>   
> You are all amazing. Thank you for the continued support.  
> 


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> • I apologize profusely for the delay—life decked me in the face this week. Not an excuse, but a reason.  
> • On a happier note: Holy shit, folks. Your comments have cleared my skin, watered my crops and given me back at _least_ five years of my life. I'm going to take the time to reply to them over the next few days, but please know that I appreciate each and every one of you. Thank you, thank you, _thank you_.  
>  • A little heavy on the introductions this chapter, but stick it out—the second part promises a much-anticipated reunion.  
>   
> 

# iv: signal to noise 

*

 _All alone, I feel your breath,_  
_I hear your whispers,_  
_Dark like storms —  
Telling me ‘dear, I'll never leave your mind’…_

*

The first thing Jack does when they reach the hotel is peel off his jacket to reveal the thick, black lines of his soul-mark to Ana, in juxtaposition to Gabriel’s discarded mask.

Though the medium differs from ink to kevlar, the resemblance is unmistakable. Ana reaches out to touch the mark, sliding neatly into Jack’s personal space. He yields and the brief graze of her hand against his skin leaves him hollow and cold, even as the rest of him burns in shame. She leans back, concern etched into the deep lines of her face, and waits.

It’s there, perched on the end of the bed, still clad entirely in her tactical gear, that she coaxes the entire story from him, sentence by halted sentence, until eventually the words stop coming and they lapse into silence. Jack picks at an exposed thread on his sleeve, tries not to feel like he’s being judged.

Ana sighs.

“I can only help you if you let me, Jack,” she says, not unkindly, leaning forward to catch his eye. His gaze follows obediently as she leans back. “The question is, will you?”

He smiles wearily. “I’m open to suggestions.”

“That’s not a yes,” she chides him, “but it’ll do for now.”

There’s a glimmer in her eye that he recognizes, though there’s a good decade between now and the last time he saw it. She has an idea, one he’s bound to hate. Every cell in his body implores him not to ask.

He asks.

“What are you thinking?”

Ana digs into the pocket of her coat and pulls out a phone. It’s an older model, well-used, and it responds quickly to her commands as she connects first to the extranet, then to a private server, and—

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Jack groans, dropping his face into his hands and rubbing his tired eyes. When he looks up, it’s to glare at her, though the expression lacks heat. “Really? _That’s_ your plan?”

“It’s a good plan,” she says, raising an eyebrow.

“It’s _not,_ ” he argues.

Ana hands him the communicator in lieu of a reply. He directs his glare to the offending item, still broadcasting the words in alternating white-and-yellow script: AGENT RECALL, ANSWER: Y/N?

“No,” he says.

“Yes,” she counters, in the exact same tone and inflection.

He wonders if he sounds that petulant, supposes he does. It’s neither attractive nor appropriate for a man of his years, but something about Ana sends him straight back to his early thirties. He isn’t sure if that’s good or bad. Her presence is both painful and coveted—unwanted but sorely needed, like so many things he’s ignored these past few years.

Jack figures there are worst ways to spend his time than rallying under his old banner.

Ana sees the instant he folds, and smiles.

*

Somewhere between retiring to bed and waking up the next morning, the mask disappears.

Jack searches for it, but to no avail. It's gone.

*

Behind the visor, Jack’s eyes rove the broad, weathered face of Reinhardt Wilhelm as the old warrior crosses the tarmac to greet them. He looks tired but healthy, and certainly doesn’t lack for enthusiasm at the sight of an old friend, pulling Ana into a tight hug the moment she’s within his grasp. They part smiling, each looking better for the reunion.

To Jack, Reinhardt inclines his head amicably and smiles.

It’s harder than he anticipated, standing in front of the man that delivered his eulogy—one of few men who truly knew Jack Morrison—and lying through his teeth. Even as a relic of a bygone age, Jack's too high-profile a target, as vigilante and former leader both. Anonymity is paramount, or so they agreed, and clad in full uniform, face-plate concealing his features from view, Jack is every bit the strong, stoic soldier that was promised when Ana made the call.

Nothing more, nothing less.

It hasn't escaped his notice that everything they're doing rides on the assumption that Reaper  _hasn't_ told Talon who he is, or what they are to each other. It's a flaw in their logic that Jack tries not to think about, for the simple reason that he's thought it to death already. In the two weeks leading up to this meeting, between counting out supplies and watching Ana clean and reassemble her rifle, Jack had more than his fair share of time to think—sleepless nights and listless days wondering if Gabriel knew.

His answer? He had to have. It's the only explanation of all the facts, from how deep Jack's betrayal cut to their violent altercation at Giza.

So having been aware of it—and of Jack—for so long, has Reaper told Talon? It's plausible, considering how much he seems to hate him, yet Jack can't quite make the leap and say he has told them. Not out of care or a sense of mistaken loyalty, no, but self-preservation. If the terrorist organisation learns the truth—that they're soul-marked for each other—it could put him in a precarious position, the possibility of which strikes Jack with unnamed dread.

No, Gabriel won't sell him out. Not over this.

“It is good to see you, my friends, though I wish it were under better circumstances.”

Reinhardt's voice cuts through Jack's thoughts, jarring him back into the present. He resists the urge to shake his head as if to dispel the vestiges. It's of no use; Gabriel comes and goes as he pleases, both in form and in thought.

“As do we,” says Ana, a steady presence by his side.

“If things were better,” Jack adds gruffly, “there’d be no need for us.”

Reinhardt smiles. “True enough.”

Ana shoots Jack a sideways glance and he's immobilized by that feeling again, of being judged and found wanting. He turns his head and stares at her, an exaggerated motion to compensate her inability to see through the visor. After a beat, her expression softens. Whatever she has observed—and Jack doesn’t doubt there’s something—has tempered her, at least for now.

“The winds haven’t lost their bite,” she remarks. “Would you care to show us inside, Reinhardt?”

“Of course,” he replies graciously, offering his arm to her, which she takes with a smile.

He leads her to the entrance, idle conversation quieting to a dull drone in Jack’s ears. Reinhardt startles a laugh out of Ana and it carries in the relative silence of the day. Neither of them notice his absence.

Alone, Jack lingers at the threshold of the huge hangar bay doors. He thumbs the release for his mouth-guard, pulls it away from his face and breathes deep, allowing the fresh Gibraltar air to fill his lungs. Through the visor, his eyes track the sun as it makes its slow descent toward the horizon, casting a warm reflection over the water. The ocean is a deep blue, depths unfathomable, and he can hear the far-off sound of waves crashing against the cliffs. The sound centers him, smoothing over his unease like a balm.

When at last he feels prepared, he replaces the mask, turns on his heel and follows them inside.

Reinhardt takes them through several common areas, including the mess. The normally bustling room yawns silent and hollow—there isn’t a soul in sight. The barracks, armory and shooting range are similarly deserted; the state-of-the-art equipment lies dormant, hallways empty. It paints an eerie picture, each room bathed in the white glow of overhead lights yet shadowed by what isn’t there.

As they enter the command structure, Reinhardt explains: “The recall was just the beginning. Rebuilding Overwatch is a long and busy process. We’ve dispatched all active agents to recruitment, supply and reconnaissance missions. I alone hold the fort for their return.”

He scans his key-card at the door. It opens. Reinhardt beckons them into the room and closes it behind him, securing the lock. Stepping over the threshold, Jack’s focus is stolen by the holographic display at the center of the room, screen upon screen of information uplinks, keeping the base apprised of events in real-time. Nostalgia strikes like a knife in his gut.

If the base at Zurich was the heart of Overwatch, then Gibraltar was the brain.

 _Is_ the brain, he corrects, soaking in the charged air. Ana sidles up beside him, similarly rapt by the give and take of data from all around the world. Reinhardt, accustom to the display, chooses to watch them instead, genuinely pleased by their reactions.

Jack tears himself away, turning his back on the glow of the monitors to address their host.

“Anything interesting?” he asks, superfluously. He already knows the answer.

“Quite,” says Reinhardt, a smile playing on his lips.

He selects a data point from the array and pushes it towards the conference desk, where it reappears in the center. They form a semi-circle around it, Jack and Ana watching as Reinhardt pulls apart the information. It follows intuitively, yielding to his touch. It’s incredible.

“Talon is growing increasingly aggressive in their pursuit of ex-Overwatch agents,” Reinhardt says, opening the corresponding data.

A security feed blossoms to life in front of them—video only—of Gibraltar's laboratory. Jack startles at the sight of a Talon hit-squad storming the halls. As they reach the entrance to the lab, someone cuts the lights and the feed plunges into darkness.

“A strike team, led by the mercenary Reaper—”

Jack stiffens. Ana’s hand finds his and squeezes, a silent show of support.

Unaware of the exchange, Reinhardt continues speaking.

“—attacked and attempted to steal all known agent locations from Athena’s servers,” he explains. “Winston prevented the theft and chose to initiate the recall. Since then, Talon has located and killed twenty-six of our agents, all involved in the previous establishment of Overwatch, all in the upper echelons. Had they gotten their hands on the information that night, the death toll would be much higher and I don’t believe we’d be standing here right now discussing this.”

He finishes on a sigh, grief written into the lines of his face. Jack feels for him, the burden he’s shouldered; a burden they share.

 _Some more than others,_ he thinks, as Gabriel lingers in the forefront of his mind. He can’t help but take responsibility for Reaper’s involvement, both in the attack and in Talon.

“How many agents have responded to the recall?” Ana asks, eyes fixed on the list of the dead.

“Only half,” says Reinhardt. “Which is sizable but still not enough to rival the growing army. A few have acknowledged the recall but have chosen to remain as they are—some have new lives, others are unable to escape their circumstances.” He runs his hand over his face and turns to them with a tired smile.

“Not for the first time I wish Jack was here. He had a way of inspiring people, uniting all under a single banner. He would know what to do.”

Guilt hits him like a physical blow and it takes every ounce of willpower he has not to outwardly react.

Instead, he finds the steel in his spine and fortifies himself with a reminder that he’s _not_ Jack Morrison, not here. He’s a faceless, nameless soldier—a number, not a human. It’s all he can be. If Reinhardt is correct and high-ranking Overwatch agents are being targeted by Talon, then the decision to keep his identity a secret has become all the more critical. Apart from the UN Council Jack reported to, there was no position higher in the organisational structure than Strike Commander.

He meets Ana’s eyes, which mirror his sad resignation.

It’s the only way.

Besides, Overwatch doesn’t need the Strike Commander. In respect for the dead, Reinhardt sees only the good in his late friend. Jack knows better. He’s responsible for as much blood and pain and death as Gabriel. The only difference being that Jack’s missions were sanctioned, his crimes deemed by the masses as _making the hard call_ and _for the greater good._ Jack wore the mantle of the Golden Boy, equal parts protective and restrictive. Gabriel had no such protection, and was all but thrown to the wolves.

“It isn’t fair, is it?” Jack says suddenly, realizing it himself. It’s easy to dismiss the claim as a reference to fallen comrades, which Reinhardt clearly does. Ana simply inclines her head in an attempt to puzzle him out. Jack stares back, remaining still, his masked face betraying nothing.

“No,” she says, after a beat. “It isn’t.”

The tension that lingers is abruptly shattered by an alarm from a monitor in the center of the room. Reinhardt flocks to it, his large hands a flurry of movement as he brings up the data.

The message within the broadcast is encoded, but if the pinched look on Reinhardt’s face is any indication, he understands what it says perfectly well.

“The team in Virginia has encountered heavy resistance and is requesting support,” he tells them, stricken by the news. “I’m sorry, but I’ll have to cut this meeting short. With all our agents dispatched, there’s nobody else that can—”

He cuts off the sentence, realization blooming on his face. The tense line of his body relaxes by degrees and the resulting smile lights his eyes as much as it does his face. Jack can’t help but feel he’s just witnessed Reinhardt restoring to his factory settings.

“Comrades," he booms. "Are you ready to earn your keep?”

*

The mission goes off without a hitch. The two of them arrive in time to flank the enemy, relieving the pressure long enough for Winston to complete his analysis and get clear of the blast radius. By the end of the fight, Jack and Ana are supported by all four members of the original ground team.

It’s there, shaking himself free of pulse munitions while Ana ushers the last wayward agent into the jet, that Jack realizes what she saw in pulling them back into this; Overwatch gives them a chance to be a part of something greater. It gives them _purpose_.

And wasn’t that what he and Gabriel had set out to do, all those years ago? More than an answer to the Omnic Crisis, more than a global peacekeeping armada, Overwatch was a symbol of hope and promise, of purpose and innovation. Before it fell apart, they were heroes.

He doesn’t feel much like a hero anymore. Soldier: 76 is a far cry from the innate strength and willpower of Jack Morrison, Strike Commander. Jack’s old and tired; he’s damaged goods.

He thinks that after everything he’s been through, he may never feel any differently. He also thinks that it may not matter what he thinks and feels at all, because a little girl in Dorado would say otherwise. It isn’t always enough for him—there are days he needs more than what the memory of her can possibly give—but luckily, today isn’t one of those days.

It’s on that note that he enters Winston’s laboratory in the hours after the debrief, all grim determination and drive. Still, he’s sure to tread carefully, unsure of his welcome. As far as the scientist is concerned, Jack’s just another recruit. Less green than the others, perhaps, but a new face nonetheless.

It wouldn’t do to look like he’s infringing, so the first thing he does upon crossing the threshold is call out, “Hello?”

There’s a clatter of something metal hitting the floor, followed by a muffled curse. Winston’s head pops up from behind a storage container, shrewd eyes roving the haphazard landscape of his lab. They land on Jack, standing awkwardly by the door, and light up.

“Ah, come in—76, is it?”

Jack nods, a touch surprised by the friendly tone. There’s a gruff exterior Jack equips when he becomes Soldier: 76 and he sometimes finds he plays the part of the restless vigilante a touch too well, in that it tends to drive people off. Winston is either ignorant of it or has elected to ignore it entirely. Considering how smart he is, Jack’s bet is on the latter.

“What brings you to my neck of the woods?”

“There’s something I wished to speak with you about,” Jack prompts. “You said in the debriefing that you’re having trouble cracking Talon’s encryption codes?”

“Yes,” Winston says slowly, studying him from behind the frames of his narrow glasses, “I am.”

He motions to the stool on the other side of his workbench, thankfully free of clutter. The same state of cleanliness can’t be said about the bench itself, however; the scattered remains of a half-finished shield generator cover three-fourths of the space, leaving little room for much else.

Jack takes a seat, bouncing slightly to test the chair’s ability to distribute his weight.

Winston continues, “Talon’s security is remarkable; it’s putting up quite the fight.”

“I might have a way to fix that,” Jack counters, reaching into his pocket to pull out a data drive. It’s one of two drives containing the data he stole out from under Talon at the depot in Maryland.

 _The first time I saw Reaper,_ he thinks, solemnly. _Everything changed after that, including me._

Winston’s eyes fall on the data drive.

“Are you sure?” he asks.

Jack shrugs. “Worked for me. It’ll get you in.”

He leans forward and slides the drive as best he can through the spare parts that litter the workbench. Winston picks it up and looks at it thoughtfully. “Thank you, I look forward to studying this,” he says. “Is there anything I can do for you in return?”

Jack pauses, considering his options.

He says, “I’d appreciate it if you can keep me apprised of anything concerning the mercenary, Reaper.”

Winston doesn’t look surprised, and the knot in Jack’s chest lessens by degrees.

“I take it Reinhardt informed you of my encounter with him?” Jack nods. Winston sighs. “Reaper’s bad news, but I’m sure you know that already. If I find anything relevant to him in the data we’ve recovered, you’ll be the first I tell.”

His tone is earnest. Despite his inherent wariness, Jack’s inclined to believe him.

The matter concluded, he stands to leave, but not without one final question from Winston. “You have a score to settle with him too, then?”

Jack turns away.

“Yeah,” he says, “something like that.” 

*

Jack dreams of coming apart.

His disintegration is agony, white-hot and exquisite. It pins him to the mattress and holds him there, tighter than any physical restraint. Gnarled fingers force his compliance, the scrape of razor-sharp nails against his skin a warning: _don’t struggle, don’t fight back._

Smoke wafts forth from his parted lips. There’s a thin cord of red at the heart of the cloud; the glowing coils of his body unwinding. What keeps him alive is also killing him, and he doesn’t want to die. Not here. Not like this. Besieged by his own cells; betrayed by something closer still.

Pieces of him circulate the air like cinders. They burn upon re-entry when he breathes them in, little hot coals slipping a red path down his throat. He’s flaming up from the inside out.

_Burning._

He’s lost in an ocean of smoke.

_Drowning._

Fire in the water.

The pain gnaws at his insides, hollow and hungry. It’s the worst kind of pain, that of loss.

Jack knows without even thinking it, without even hazarding a guess, that there are a scant few moments in a day where he _isn’t_ in this pain—that those few, painless seconds come right after a kill, absorbing the life-force of those who dare step in his path. Even then, the pain abates long enough for him to take a single, shuddering breath before it returns; the reprieve itself a blessing, but the knowledge that it will all come flooding back the moment the soul is gone and the victim truly departed—that the relief is a fleeting, fragile thing—is what makes it a curse.

The dream abandons him there, in that space between, where he’s both burning up and drowning to death. A feedback loop of the most terrible agony imaginable, the kind you are helpless to prevent.

Jack wakes with a scream on his lips, the words in the forefront of his mind:

_Fire in the water._

*

In the weeks following Jack’s admission into Overwatch, several events occur in rapid succession, each a blow to their already rocky foundations:

The assassination of Tethraka Mondatta makes news headlines the world over, sparking controversy from both sides. Doomfist’s gauntlet is nearly stolen from a museum in Numbani by Reaper and the sniper, Widowmaker, foiled only by the combined efforts of Winston and Tracer.

Perhaps the most disconcerting to Jack, however, is the mounting tension in Russia as Voskaya Industries suffers another wave of defective Omnics, reverting to the higher calling of a rogue God Program, the kind of technology Jack thought dead and buried at the close of the Crisis.

All three incidents have Talon written all over it, though he’s loathe to associate Russia to Reaper, knowing full well he’d never be complicit in kick-starting another Omnic Crisis, no matter how far gone he was. They lost too much to that war. Too many lives.

For all that it shakes him to the core, the turmoil also serves to cement a belief he’s been harbouring, one their eclectic squad appear to share:

If there’s ever a time for the return of Overwatch, it’s now.

* 

Hours after the announcement from Voskaya, Winston summons Jack to the hub.

“76!” he announces excitedly, upon seeing him at the door. “Just the person I wanted to see.”

He beckons him inside, motioning to the malaise of mission logs that dominate the holographic display at the heart of the room. “Talon’s servers folded last night,” he says triumphantly. “The data you gave me was invaluable—I’ve been sorting through it all day and I’m ready to fulfill my part of our deal.”

“That was fast,” Jack remarks, surprised. “It took me months to compile what I gave you.”

His eyes rove the scientist’s features, noting the tell-tale signs of exhaustion.

Winston smiles tiredly, unafraid of showing it. “It’s amazing how hard you work with the right incentive.”

He motions to a data drive, different to the one Jack gave him.

“I’ve copied the data onto this disk for you,” Winston explains, then shakes his head, “but I could have just sent that down to you, of course. No, that isn’t why I called you here.”

“Why did you call me here?” Jack asks cautiously. A hundred scenarios flit through his mind, all of them bad. At the forefront of his mind is the fear that he’s been found out, that Winston knows who he is.

Winston clicks over to a particular log in the files collated on the screens.

“I found this in the search, and I thought it best to bring it to your attention right away, considering your—uh, _interest_ in the subject.”

Jack reads the log, blinks, then reads it again. Dread curls in the base of his spine but even then, he isn’t particularly surprised by what he sees.

 _Figures,_ he thinks, darkly.

Winston continues, ignorant to the give and take of emotion in Jack’s gut. “There’s a chance—however small—that one or both of them will fall. At the very least, it’s sure to stir up discord in Talon’s ranks.”

He must see something in the way Jack stiffens, as he adds, “It may not seem like it, but this is good news for us.”

Jack looks at him, panic flitting beneath his chest, in time with the rapid beating of his heart.

 _Only if you want him dead,_ he thinks, bitingly, but doesn’t dare say.

He motions to the data drive. “Can I take this?”

Winston nods.

“It’s already backed up on Athena’s servers.” He pulls out the drive and presents it to Jack, mirroring his stiffness. “It’s all yours.”

“Thank you,” Jack says shortly, and takes his leave.

As he walks away from the hub, he thinks that Winston may not return the sentiment if he knew what Jack planned to do with it.

*

Since the attacks began, they've been off their feet with requests for assistance, so it isn’t a surprise when Reinhardt whittles away their teams to four members each. It isn’t ideal—they work better in groups of six, with enough space for several offense fighters, defense, a tank and support—but nothing about the situation can be considered ideal, so he swallows his objections and gets back to work.

The going is tough, even for him. Talon appears to be everywhere at once and every hour his team isn’t off-base or sleeping, they’re training in new ways to eliminate their foe as quickly as possible.

It doesn’t help that in the fifteen missions he’s taken part in since joining, he hasn’t encountered Reaper once. Others have, which is the only way Jack knows he’s still alive, and it’s starting to piss him off.

When they receive their choice of missions, he instantly gravitates to the mention of a bio-weapon on lock up in the Center of Disease Control. If Reaper will be anywhere, it’s there. When picking his team, he chooses Winston, Tracer and Ana to accompany him—all veterans, all prepared.

“Pharah is more than capable of leading a team in your stead,” he says to Ana in his quarters, later. “It’ll send the message that you trust her. Besides, she's paired with Reinhardt and Angela and you know they’ll watch her back. I need someone I can trust to watch mine—I need _you_.”

“Alright,” she replies, conceding to his point, and that’s that.

The mission is absolute mayhem from the moment they arrive. Jack hits the ground running, pulse rifle raised and firing at the oncoming Talon force. Tracer zips ahead, scouting their advance and dealing damage of her own with her two rapid-fire pistols. She’s followed closely by Winston, who takes an almighty leap over the heads of their welcome party, heading into the belly of the building.

Ana moves last of all, keeping her distance from the fight, scoping the three of them in the sights of her sniper rifle and keeping them afloat as they make quick work of Talon’s men.

Flanked on all sides by Jack’s team, Talon have little hope of winning, and switch tactics to delay them as long as possible, fighting fast and dirty.

One of the men catches Jack unaware as he’s reloading, taking him in a brutal choke-hold. He thrashes, clawing at the man’s arm around his neck, trying in vain to kick him off. His eyes widen as stars bloom across his peripheral vision, seconds away from losing consciousness. He looks for something— _anything_ —that could possibly help him win this fight.

It’s then that Jack sees him, carving a path through the fray:

 _Reaper_.

In an instant, his mission changes from stopping Talon to something infinitely more personal. Jack stops resisting, taking his foe off guard. The man’s grip loosens, giving him the room he needs to break the choke-hold. From there, it’s all too easy to sweep for the ankles and strike the agent across the face with the butt of his pulse rifle. He drops like a rock, straight down, hitting the floor with a resounding _thwack_ that rattles in Jack’s ears, magnified by the adrenaline coursing through his veins—

Then he’s off, following Reaper’s shadow down the long corridor, eyes glued to the man’s retreating back. He’s clad in swathes of black leather—the same apparatus Jack saw in Giza—and has replaced the mask they stole. It’s a uniform, Jack realizes. Not unlike his own.

The sense of urgency that propels him down the corridor is near-overwhelming now, reaching fever-pitch, a boiling in his blood.

He has to find him. He _has to._

Reaper disappears into the room.

Jack crosses the threshold of the door half-braced for an ambush, but it never comes.

He finds Reaper on the other side of the room standing before the large, reinforced door to the decontamination chamber, beyond which lies the payload. His gloved hand has curled around the handle of the heavy door, poised to open it. When he hears him approach, however, he stops and turns, leveling the barrel of his shotgun to Jack’s chest.

Jack waits with bated breath, fingers curled around the trigger of the pulse rifle. He wants to see what Reaper will do—what _Gabriel_ will do—now that they’re alone and face-to-face. Though his body stiffens at the sight of the gun, something in him holds firm, refusing to stand down.

It pays off when, seconds later, Reaper huffs a laugh—a dark and withered thing, devoid of any true humor—and drops the shotgun. It dissolves to smoke before it hits the floor, discarded but not forgotten.

Reaper closes the distance between them in a quick, unbroken stride, delivering the first punch across Jack’s face with a strength that doesn't waver. He’s furious, breath coming out in short, sharp pants behind the mask, his hands tightening into fists in preparation for the next blow.

Jack gives him that first punch, parries the second and third. By the fourth, he isn’t screwing around anymore. He gives as good as he gets, landing a sharp kick to Reaper’s left flank, followed by a volley of punches, of which only one lands a hit. It’s of no consequence, as in the next instant, Jack uses Reaper’s momentum against him, crash-tackling the other man to the floor.

He holds the upper hand for about half a second before the solid weight beneath him dissipates into smoke. It’s a marvel and a tragedy, witnessing his abilities up close, but Jack can spare no thought to either. Rather, he’s struck by how utterly bewildering it is to have your foe quite literally slip between your fingertips to coalesce behind you, right as Reaper’s knee sinks into his back, forcing him down.

“You can’t win,” Reaper rasps. His voice is like sandpaper on skin—rough, bordering on painful. “Not here.” He digs his knee in further; Jack grunts. “Not against me.”

Jack turns his face to the side so that it's pressed flush against the floor. He breathes, relishing in the pressure in his chest, the burn in his lungs as they struggle to fill. He’s in the worst possible position here, yet all he feels is triumph.

“Depends on what I’m fighting for, Reyes,” he utters. “I may not win this battle, but I _will_ win the war.”

With the last vestiges of energy in his old and tired bones, Jack twists. The movement loosens Reaper’s grip just barely, but it’s all Jack needs to throw them back into close combat.

His world narrows to action and reaction, the fight a precarious and violent dance between two expert performers. He can’t deny the thrill that lances through him upon realizing that he and Gabriel remain perfectly matched; separated as they might be by years and experience and bad blood, their bodies remember what their minds cannot—the closeness cultivated by decades of fighting alongside each other, the instinctual knowledge of what the other will do next.

Every muscle in his body is engaged in the fight, every thought centered on recognizing the pattern of attack, both Reaper’s and his own.

Reaper’s ability to become smoke is a curve-ball, allowing him to phase through attacks entirely, but the longer Jack studies it—and _him_ —the more he’s convinced that it comes at a cost.

He tests his theory the next time Reaper uses the ability, delivering a brutal punch to Reaper’s mask as it comes back into view. The impact knocks him back and to the ground, not enough to remove the mask but benching him for the few, valuable seconds it takes for Jack to close the distance.

A second blow keeps him down, a deep sound of pain echoing from his chest. Jack draws back, staring down at the bone-white mask, a mirror image to the mark etched deep into his own skin.

As if roused by the thought, his bicep starts to prickle, a pins-and-needles sensation that trickles down the length of his arm to where it holds the other man to the floor.

Jack frowns down at it, tightens his grip in response.

“What are you waiting for?” Reaper hisses, exhaustion evident in his voice. “Finish it.”

Only Jack isn’t listening to him. Rather, his attention is taken by Reaper’s hand clutching his side, in the same area Jack kicked in earlier, and the blood that splatters the leather.

He recoils sharply. Violently.

“I—” Jack starts, only the words die in his throat. _He_ did that. _He_ is responsible for Reaper’s pain.

The world lists sharply as Jack’s hands close around Reaper’s leather-clad wrist with a gentleness that belies the buzzing in his head and the prickling in his fingertips. The mark is burning now, scorching.

There’s something else there, an invisible tunnel that connects Jack to elsewhere—an outbound signal that has been there for years, since the explosion in Zurich. It’s grown in size and pitch over the past few months, at a rate matching his awareness, a near-perfect mirror to the cresting realization that there’s a recipient to that signal, a destination to that tunnel, that he’s both receiving _and_ transmitting.

Jack finds the thread of it inside of him. He tugs at it, testing.

Reaper struggles beneath his hand, oblivious to the turmoil in Jack’s mind. “What the fuck are you—”

Jack pulls.

The thread unravels and with it, _pain._ It alights every nerve in Jack’s body, his muscles locking in a single, fluid motion and he buckles with it, this white-hot agony that licks up his spine and down his throat and in his head—god, _pounding_ in his head.

Jack falls hard to the floor beside Reaper, who escapes his now loose grip. He registers the sight of Reaper rising to his knees, mask tilted down to where Jack struggles against the all-encompassing wave of pain that breaks like high tide on his skin, narrowing his focus to the single act of trying to escape it, seeing all else but not understanding it, not fully.

Except that Reaper draws a breath and Jack _feels_ it, just as he fights to draw one of his own.

He knows without asking that this is the first, painless breath Gabriel has taken in years, the same way he knows this isn’t the first time he’s felt such a terrible pain before.

His mind scrambles to figure out where, and _why_ —

The missing piece of the puzzle slots into place with a snap that Jack feels like the breaking of bone, gut-wrenching and inescapable, too much to handle in a single moment, let alone a lifetime.

Because he felt this exact pain before, in the weeks following the explosion, when his body was too weak to do anything more than shake with it until finally— _mercifully_ —he passed out. The doctors believed it was the breaking of a soul-bond, but that explanation had never sat right with Jack as, to the best of his knowledge, he had never been bonded. Only he had, and it wasn’t the destruction of a bond that caused the pain, but the creation of one. _This_ one.

_And it wasn’t his pain at all._

Jack wrenches himself back into the present, fights tooth and nail for whatever scrap of awareness he can find and pushes past what is visible, through that incandescent tunnel,  _beyond_ it. He feels a weightlessness that isn’t his own, free of the pain that assails him. He feels the dull stirrings of anger slowly dissipating like the very smoke his body becomes. He feels confusion, totally and utterly.

Reaper’s emotions fall over Jack like a blanket, dulling the edges of the pain, but only just. The part of his mind that started this refuses to relinquish it, determined to understand it.

“Is it always this painful?” Jack asks, voice hoarse. “God, no wonder you hate me.”

Reaper continues to stare at him, a silent sentinel by Jack's side. The pain ricochets just beneath his rib-cage, causing his chest to tighten and his vision to white out at the edges. It’s incomprehensible, the idea that Gabriel has persisted with this pain for so long. A pain that Jack had a hand at putting him in, however peripherally.

Something pulls at the edges of Reaper’s confusion. It takes Jack a moment to realize it’s panic.

“What—what is this Jack?” he asks, voice low behind the mask. He sounds small, and so far away. It’s no tone he’s ever heard from him, not even _before_. “What did you do?”

Jack continues as if he hadn’t heard him, because of all the things he has to deal with right now—the fight, the knowledge, the pain—Reaper sounding _scared_ isn’t one of them.

“For what it’s worth,” Jack says, “I didn’t know. I didn’t even know you were alive.” He swallows, something sharp and hot prickling at the corners of his eyes. “But… I should have. I should have put it together sooner, the pieces of this puzzle that—that you were trying to show me.”

It’s all too much and not enough. He’s being torn apart, pulled in two—he wants to bare his soul.

He wants to _flee._

“I think part of me knew, when that bomb went off, part of me knew what I was to you, even unconsciously, and I couldn’t let that go,” he utters. “I think—I think you’re here because of me, the same way I’m here because of you.”

The pain washes over him with the whisper of _my fault_ and he knows he can’t leave it here. He has to go deeper. He has to finish this.

Jack closes his eyes.

“I was going to die in that wreckage. I’d given up. But there was some part of me, buried deep down, that wouldn’t let me.” He opens his eyes, looks up to where Reaper stares at him through the slits in his mask. Black smoke coils in the space between them. “It was you.”

Reaper looks away. Jack’s breath stutters in his throat. “It was, wasn’t it? That’s how you knew I was alive. That’s how you knew I’d—”

_Left without you._

The words go unspoken, but they’re the loudest thing in the room. They echo in the empty spaces, the sadness that wells in Jack, his and Gabriel’s both.

“But neither of us understood what truly happened that night. What I did. What this—” Jack motions between them, a single gesture to encapsulate this broken thing they have become. “—is.”

He sighs. It hurts, like everything else he does hurts. It’s a small price to pay for the chance to speak his mind. For a chance, perhaps, to set things right.

Knowing that doesn’t make it any easier.

“I know you hate me,” he whispers, “and I understand why, I do. I can feel it in me.” He indicates his chest with a hand that shudders, tears prickling at his eyes. “Like a cancer. I hate me too.”

“ _Jack_ —”

The other man sounds wretched. His expression is indecipherable behind the mask, but his voice and the emotion that rolls over Jack like thunder in the night betrays him. The pain he feels has nothing to do with the physical burden of what he’s become, and all to do with Jack’s words.  _I’m still hurting you,_ Jack thinks, the wrong side of delirious. _I’m sorry._

To Reaper, he swallows and says: “I know the last thing you want to do right now is trust me, but you have to. That information I stole from Talon? There’s something in it you’ll want to see.”

Jack fingers his jacket pocket and pulls out a data drive. He can feel the moment the other man's mind makes the connection, the spark of surprise, suspicion and—beneath it all—curiosity.

“It’s only a matter of time before they come for you,” Jack tells him. “Be ready.”

He focuses, in that moment, on keeping himself open. He’s weak from the transference of pain and emotion; he doesn’t know how much longer he can keep the soul-bond open for. But he has to. Reaper has to know, has to _feel_ Jack’s sincerity.

“Gabriel,” Jack says, and it isn’t him—the tired, battered old soldier—who speaks. It’s Morrison, the young recruit from the ass-end of nowhere who tried too hard and cared too much. “Even if you think it’s a—a trick or that I’m making this up… _please_  have an out.”

Jack pushes the drive across the floor towards him, the action depleting his strength.

The last thing he sees before the darkness swallows him is a black-clad glove picking it up off the ground, and the sharp lines of Reaper’s barn-owl mask swooping toward him like the bird it was crafted after.

*

Later, Ana will tell him that Reaper re-enters the fray like a man possessed, gathers up the remainder of his Talon forces and leaves. There’s no word of warning; he’s there and then gone.

As for Jack, Tracer finds him in a sweep of the compound, sprawled out before the forward entrance to the decontamination chamber, unconscious but stable. The hatch in the thick, reinforced doors reveal the bio-weapon still safe in its chamber, a further scan concluding that the material within remains untouched. When the sweep is done and there’s nothing left for them to see, Winston scoops his limp body into a fireman’s carry and they depart.

The atmosphere on the ride back to base is tense. Nobody can make heads or tails of what happened, if they actually won, and what it means if they have. It _looks_ like a victory, in that the payload is secure and their agents are accounted for (if a little bruised), but it _feels_ like a defeat—the unnaturally quick way the battle ended suggests there’s more to Talon’s plan than meets the eye.

Ana frets over Jack, guarding him fiercely though she knows no further harm will befall him in their present company. The team has known him for a scant few weeks under the guise of the rugged vigilante, but the strain around their eyes betray their concern for their fallen teammate, even one as irritable and enigmatic as the Soldier.

It takes her less than an hour to hack the closed-circuit feed of the tactical visor, still secured around the middle third of Jack’s face. Nobody asked to remove it, for which she is grateful. Though she carries mixed feelings about the lie they both conceal, she knows it’s for the greater good; there’ll be a time and place where the memory of Jack Morrison will be of use to them and it isn’t now.

Ana reviews the footage of Jack’s confrontation with Reaper, shaken slightly by the realization that they’re not only matched but bonded. There’s a story there, one she’ll have to ask about later. She chides Jack silently for his impulsiveness when he falls to the floor in agony, and her heart breaks further still at the wretched desperation in his voice as he begs Reaper to believe him.

It doesn’t surprise her to hear that Talon has a permanent solution to their Reaper problem—while he makes a powerful ally, he is also a vicious enemy to have. Were it anyone but Talon, she’d feel a stroke of pity for them—being on the receiving end of the Reaper’s vengeance is a brutal way to go—but they tore her family apart, and deserve no such lenience. She has a score of her own to settle with them.

What does surprise her is how far along the two of them are, considering the fallout of their last confrontation. While initially coming to blows, the conversation that followed was almost, by their standards, _civil._ Watching Gabriel yield to his former self gives Ana hope, the kind she allows herself to feel only sparingly—when Fareeha smiles at her, or Jack tells her to trust him and she does—and the concern in his voice when he speaks Jack’s name is, as far as she can gauge, genuine.

“Find anything?” a voice asks, drawing Ana back into the close confines of the plane.

It’s Winston, perched on the edge of the two seats opposite her.

Ana tilts her head, feigning ignorance, but it’s of no use; she’s been caught red-handed. She refuses to feel bad for the breach of privacy, however—if Jack didn’t wish for her to get in, he’d do a better job at keeping her out.

“I know better than to ask for the details, but it’s clear something happened there. I’ve never seen Reaper so enraged, not even when I electrocuted him.” He motions to the tactical visor with a wry smile. “It’s obvious the two of them have a past—an unhappy one, if this is where they stand with each other. I guess my question to you is: Should I worry?”

Ana smiles at him. The lingering sadness to the upward pull of her mouth speaks volumes.

“If you’re anything like me, Winston, we’ll worry anyway.”

He laughs. “I know, but there’s a difference.”

“There is,” she agrees. “Answer me this first, then: The data drive you gave to him, what was on it?”

There’s no need to clarify who _he_ is, or which data drive she’s talking about. The question itself is more than enough to infer what happened, especially to someone as smart as Winston. The tense line of his bulky shoulders relaxes, as much as it can in his armor. It appears Ana just confirmed his suspicions.

 _Good,_ she thinks. _I can’t be the only one looking out for Jack._

“In exchange for a decryption key to Talon’s servers, 76 requested any information on those servers relating to Reaper,” Winston says. “The data drive contains that information, mainly mission reports and the like. There are several internal communiques that suggested Talon were looking into ways to dispose of Reaper, should the need arise, which it appears it will as soon as they’ve achieved their objective. He’s volatile and Talon knows it. Other than that, there was some supplementary information on the nature of his condition—namely the degenerative properties of the nanites.” A troubled look passes over his face, schooled seconds later by a calm, if tired, expression.

“What is it?” Ana asks gently.

Winston shakes his head. “It’s just… I don’t like the man by any definition of the word,” he says, “but I wouldn’t wish that pain on anybody.”

It’s on that note that they lapse into silence, each taken by the weight of their own thoughts. Ana wonders what Jack’s gotten himself into with all of this, but the question answers itself as soon as it’s asked— _it’s Gabriel,_ she thinks.  _It’s as simple as that._

“Yes,” she says suddenly, to Winston and the room at large.

He looks up. “Beg pardon?”

“You asked me if you should worry,” Ana says simply. “My answer to your question is _yes_.”

* 

There’s dirt under his fingernails, hands callused and aching. The drink in his hand is blissfully cold, perspiration setting into the grooves of his fingers. He takes a long drag, feels the alcohol hit the back of his throat, and sets the now-empty glass on the bar counter. He squares his shoulders and calls for another, pulling a few notes from the pocket of his threadbare jeans.

As far as dreams go, Jack thinks, it’s remarkably realistic. Tactile. He can feel the way the stool digs into the back of his thighs, how the world appears crisp and new through the lenses of his wrap-around glasses. They’re the first pair Markus gave him, a pair he hasn’t worn in months now, not since it became necessary to hide his identity. He misses them, misses their simplicity; he almost feels normal in them.

The bar door opens, strikes the little bell at the threshold. Jack continues to stare into his glass, as if by studying it he can determine how all of this came to be. He’s never been here before, in this bar at the end of the road. He’s never even been to this state.

He gets his answer in the form of a voice behind him, tired and angry, “Get out of my head, Jack.”

Contrary to his words, Gabriel levers himself onto the only other bar-stool—which happens to be right beside Jack—and waves the bartender over for a drink. Jack peers at him from the corner of his eye, gets the faintest impression of dark skin and even darker clothing.

This isn’t Reaper he’s sitting with; it’s Reyes.

Jack says, “I don’t know if I can.”

It’s the truth. He doesn’t know if Gabriel believes him; he isn’t quite sure he cares. Rather, he’s struck by the duality of this place, both achingly familiar and completely alien to him. They’d do this all the time back in SEP—sit side-by-side on uncomfortable bar-stools in equally uncomfortable pubs, drinking away the vestiges of battle, trading stories and talking shit like friends do. But it’s been decades, long enough that Jack feels completely out of his element here, unversed in this new reality where, after all the arguments and misunderstandings, after all the bloodshed and death, they’ve arrived here together.

The real kicker is that Gabriel looks like he always did. He’s dressed in a sleeveless grey shirt, a pair of loose jeans and that damned beanie stretched over his head, covering his hair.  Miles of dark skin, scarred and mottled in places, just like Jack’s.

Jack looks at him and _aches._ Bone-deep and sharp, like slithers of glass beneath the skin.

He drinks the sight like Gabriel drinks his beer—in long, refreshing swigs. His eyes hone in on a patch of scar tissue on the other man’s shoulder and something inside of him clicks.

“You got shot,” he says, staring at the scar even as Gabriel turns to face him. He points. “In the shoulder, right there, about two— _no_ , three months ago. It wasn’t an ordinary bullet. You couldn’t heal properly, something in it was interfering with your… condition.”

He looks up into deep, brown eyes and knows he’s right. Gabriel watches him warily, body tensed like a bowstring pulled taut. His face is weathered by age and fatigue, but no more than it should be after all these years. The ache in Jack’s bones grows stronger.

“What happened earlier, at the warehouse,” Jack continues. “I don’t think it’s the first time it’s happened.”

Even as he says the words, he has no idea what it means—what _any_ of this means. They lapse into silence, Jack staring hard at the smooth, dark wood of the bar counter, trying to compartmentalize and failing.

Gabriel’s voice cuts the space between them.

“Neither do I,” he admits lowly, looking for all the world like speaking pains him. Perhaps it does.

Jack picks up his beer and drinks at a measured pace. He sets it down, swallows and turns his full attention to the other man. “In the hospital, all those years ago, they thought I was suffering from the breakdown of a soul-bond and the death of my soulmate. But that wasn’t it at all, was it? It wasn’t a breakdown—it was you. I have no idea how it happened…” A thought crosses his mind right then, and he shakes his head. “Except maybe I do. That night in the explosion, I tried to look for you but I couldn’t see through the smoke. I think—I think I reached out with something else, with my mind, and that connection—it…”

“Doesn’t matter,” Gabriel finishes. At Jack’s perplexed look, he scowls. “This doesn’t change anything, Jack. It can’t.”

Jack feels a thread of desperation knot low in his gut. He says, “I just want to understand. _Please._ ”

It’s the wrong thing to say. In an instant, Gabriel is in his space, the familiar lines and planes of his face warping into something menacing as he pins Jack to the bar counter, hands fisting his shirt. He bites out, “There’s no way you can possibly understand what this—this _bastardization_  of a life is like for me. That pain that was so unbearable for you? That’s a _constant_ for me. You couldn’t stomach it for all of five seconds, Jack, how do you think it feels after an hour? A day? A _week?_ ”

He releases his hold on Jack and barks, angrily, “I’m done with this—and with you.”

By the time he blinks back to himself, Gabriel has shouldered his jacket and is disappearing through the front door, fleeing the bar and with it, him. Jack gives chase immediately, heart beating rabbit-fast in his chest. He isn’t sure how he knows it, but there’s no coming back from this—for either of them—if Jack just lets him go.

He exits to the sweltering heat of mid-day. The road outside is dusty and worn, winds hot. It’s a decent hike to the city proper, tall skyscrapers and bustling populace but a shadow on the horizon out here. Jack sees Gabriel instantly, marching away from the bar in quick, angry strides. His hands are in his pockets and his head bowed, an image he’s seen a hundred times for the hundred ways he’s pissed him off. The fondness hits Jack like a battering ram; they always did bring the worst out of each other.

 _And the best,_ he thinks, as he breaks off into a run, closing the distance between them. When he’s within arm’s length, Jack doesn’t hesitate—he grabs Gabriel by the shoulders and spins him around.

To say he reacts poorly is an understatement. Jack ducks the punch Gabriel throws at him, realigning his grip to the other man’s wrists instead. Gabriel opens his mouth, starts to speak. “What the _fuck_ do you think you’re—” But Jack interrupts him.

“Fire in the water,” he blurts out desperately.

It’s a gamble, a last-ditch attempt to prove himself, to get the other man to stop, think and _talk to him_. Four little words that mean nothing at all in the grand scheme of things, but may also mean everything.

The response is instantaneous. The blood drains from Gabriel’s face and his mouth falls open, still half-chewing on the vitriol of his last words.

“What did you just say?” he grounds out.

“Fire in the water,” Jack repeats, forcefully this time. “That’s how you describe it, right? The feeling of burning up and drowning at the same time?” There’s something akin to fear in his eyes. It prompts Jack to continue. “I may not be privy to every moment of your life, Gabriel, and I certainly don’t pretend to know your pain, but do _not_ mistake my ignorance for lack of care.”

Jack releases him. Another gamble. His hand finds purchase on his shoulder now, the grip companionable rather than oppressive.

“I know you didn’t ask for this bond,” Jack says, running his other hand through his short crop of silver hair. He laughs—a rough, abrasive sound—and adds, “To be honest, neither did I. But we can’t change that it exists. We have to find a way to live with it, and I can’t do that if you’re at my throat every time we see each other.”

He looks up, into Gabriel’s eyes, dark like storm clouds. His gaze is rooted firmly on Jack, like he’s the only thing that matters. There’s a need that churns in Jack’s gut at the thought, adding to the persistent ache that lingers inside of him, tightening like a vice.

“I’m not going to ask you to forgive me. I haven’t earned that right and maybe I never will. But when we’re here, and neither of us can leave, I don’t think fighting each other is going to solve anything, so I propose a truce.” His lips twitch. “It’s in as much your best interest as it is mine.”

He can almost see the gears turn in the other man's eyes as he mulls it over, attempting to discern meaning from Jack’s cryptic words. It entrances him the same way it did the first day they met, a fresh-faced cadet reporting to his senior officer, and every time between.

“And how’s that?” Gabriel asks at length, still looking distinctly put out.

Jack smiles grimly, stretches his fingers. “I bet that trick at the warehouse will work here too.”

He turns his gaze inward, searching for the place deep inside him where the bond lies dormant. Jack taps into it with a thought, activating it with the weight of his intent. In an instant, the curling smoke and razor-sharp pain cleaves his chest, forcing him back. He staggers but stays upright, and it’s worth it for the way that Gabriel likewise reacts, looking down at himself, then at Jack.

He breathes, deeply, _visibly._

Then he asks, “ _Why?_ ” and looks for all like he doesn’t understand a thing about Jack—like he’s never seen him before in his life. The question— _why would you do this_ —lingers unfinished in his eyes, which are themselves brighter, free of the chronic ache of his existence.

And Jack…

Jack just smiles, unwilling to show his hand just yet.

“Goodnight, Gabriel,” he says instead, gathering up every modicum of energy to turn on his heel and walk away from him, out of the dreamscape and into reality—

Where he wakes to the feeling of that deep-seated agony, equal parts burning and drowning, heavy as an anvil across his body. His eyes snap open and Ana’s face coalesces in front of him, taut with worry.

Jack looks up at her, his expression tight and pain-filled, as the real world bleeds back in, shaking free the vestiges of the dream.

He sits up.

It hurts— _god,_ does it hurt—but he’s steeled by the feeling of victory that lingers, fire-bright, in his chest, made all the sweeter by the fact that Jack _chose_ this. This is something he can give.

He thinks of Gabriel returning to consciousness, taking that first, deep breath of the day and feeling only the draw of air down his throat, the contraction of his lungs on the exhale. It’s a freedom Jack takes for granted every day, a freedom Gabriel’s been without for far too long.

He thinks of him without suffering, and without pain.

Ana asks, “Is everything all right, Jack?”

“No,” Jack says, honestly. “But it will be.”

*

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> • Poor Ana. She worries. Sometimes unnecessarily, sometimes for good reason...  
> • Next chapter, and in no particular order, will see Jack: making amends, getting a headache, comforting a friend, using his words and, in true Jack Morrison fashion, fucking up really, _really_ badly.  
>  • Again, I'm so, so sorry for the delay here. Thank you for reading, and sticking by me!  
>   
> 


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> • As always, you are all wonderful. I can't thank you enough for the warm reception I've received, except to say that you make every moment I spent crafting this beast worth it.  
> • For reasons you'll soon understand, I'm going to try my hardest to get the final part out early. I have a job interview on Monday (yay), so hopefully I can get it all polished and ready to go Sunday night. Earlier if I can.  
>   
> 

# v: writing on the wall

*

 _You've been there all along—_  
_Tugging me, pulling me down  
__Touching him, holding him close  
__You've made your home_

 _And I see your face through his eyes,_  
_With every move of your hips_  
_You're breaking my bones_  
_While holding me hostage…_

*

Jack returns to his quarters in the late afternoon, ribs bandaged and head reeling, to find a message on his data-pad.

Encrypted channel, four words only:

_We need to talk._

He stares down at it blankly, then punches in a phone number from memory.

“Is this it?” he asks as the call connects. “Are you finally breaking up with me?”

“ _Yes_.”

Jack grins loosely at the air in front of him. “What will you do with all that spare time?”

_“Probably find another dumb, half-dead former commander to patch up.”_

Jack pauses. “About that.”

Einarsson groans.

 _“I’m not going to like this, am I?_ _Wait, don’t answer that. Of course I’m not going to like it. This is you were talking about here. You’re the king of poor life choices.”_

“That’s me,” Jack agrees, because Einarsson _isn’t_ going to like what he has to say. “But you first, doc. What can I do for you today?”

 _“I had to find out from the news that you’d rejoined Overwatch.”_ His voice tells Jack precisely how he feels about that. _“The same organisation that put you in a position of power then threw you to the wolves.”_

“Not exactly,” Jack says, smiling at the suspicion in the other man’s tone. “We’re operating on emergency jurisdiction from the UN, granted retroactively for our mission in Voskaya, more to avoid an international incident than it was a show of support. There are enough veterans here who remember what went down in Zurich to make sure that the old ways _never_ return. Besides, only two people know who I really am—the woman that brought me here and a mercenary who is no longer affiliated with Overwatch. To the rest, I’m just an old soldier.”

There’s a long pause along the line. Then: _“I still don’t like it.”_

Jack sighs. “I was part of the problem, Markus. I was so focused on what the public thought of us—of _me_ —that I didn’t look into the truth behind those allegations, the turmoil brewing inside. Because of that, what happened at Zurich was my fault. I’ve accepted that now.”

 _“Respectfully, Jack? I disagree,”_ Einarsson argues, and the anger in those words is palpable. _“That position was a bomb just waiting to go off, and you were the unlucky guy who stepped on the pressure plate. You were screwed no matter what you did. If you targeted the internal problems, you’d be accused of allowing public moral to falter. If you targeted the external problems, you’d be accused of allowing internal corruption to go unchecked. Either way—boom._

_“No one can thrive under that kind of pressure, not even the great Jack Morrison. There’s no way they didn’t know the kind of stress they were putting you under when they handed you that position.”_

It’s the most upset Jack has ever heard him, and it’s on _his_ behalf.

“Hindsight, huh?”

He can hear the sound of the doctor’s anger deflating. _“Sorry, Jack. It hits too close to home, is all,”_ he says, wearily. _“They study your case in schools now, did you know that? The world thinks you’re dead, so they made you into an essay question.”_ He snorts. _“I had to explain the long-term side-effects of chronic stress to my daughter the other day. I ask her what for, then she hands me this textbook with your face on it.”_

“Please tell me it isn’t that photo from—”

_“The promo vids? Yeah, it is.”_

Jack laughs. “God, I hate that photo.”

 _“You and me both,”_ Einarsson says. Then he sobers. _“Okay, so—Overwatch, that’s a thing again. You better turn it into something right, Jack. The world needs you out there defending it. You can’t do that if you’re being suffocated by red-tape—by all means, be accountable and vigilant, and never, ever let what happened in Zurich happen again, but don’t be afraid to question your orders.”_

“I won’t,” he promises.

 _“And check in more often. You don’t even have to call me, just send me an email or a text. Anything to let me know you’re not dying in a ditch somewhere.”_ He sniffs.

“I didn’t know you cared,” Jack says, teasingly.

 _“Well, I do,”_ Einarsson replies.  _“Now, in the spirit of caring, what were you going to say that I’m not going to like?”_

Jack steels himself. It's time.

“That mercenary I was talking about earlier,” he says, “the one that knows who I am. Turns out he’s my soulmate.”

Silence swallows the line.

 _“That… can’t be right.”_ He can hear the frown in Einarsson’s voice. _“Your soulmate died, Jack. The kind of pain you were in, there’s nothing else it could have been.”_

“Actually, there is,” Jack says, and proceeds to tell him what really happened the night Overwatch HQ fell, the details they couldn’t have known at the time, and Jack’s theory that it wasn’t the pain of Gabriel’s death he felt, but his resurrection and the consequences thereof.

When at last he finishes, Einarsson breathes, “ _Jesus, Jack. It’s never easy with you, is it?”_

Jack's lips quirk. “Not really, no.”

_“And your soulmate, he’s the Blackwatch Commander? Your friend, the one you thought died in the blast?”_

“Gabriel,” Jack says. “Yeah, it’s him.”

Einarsson lets out a long, low whistle. It crackles across the connection.

 _“I can look into his case if you’d like,”_ he offers. _“There have been great leaps and bounds in nanotechnology in the five years since Overwatch was first disbanded. I’d have to call my contacts in the military, pull a few strings, but there’s a good chance something they have can help him. I’ll need more information, though.”_

Jack rests the phone on the table, hits the speaker button so that he can still hear Einarsson speak. Then he presses a button on his data-pad, bringing up the email program he had ready for this exact moment. He hits send on the email in his drafts folder, heavily encrypted, addressed to Einarsson’s branch of Zurich Medical. There’s a pause, then he hears the tell-tale _beep_ of it arriving in the doctor’s inbox.

“Way ahead of you, doc,” Jack says. He feels compelled to add, “A word of warning—the people that wrote that dossier might call themselves doctors, but they don’t abide by the same oath as you do. Their method of attaining results is sketchy at best, flat-out torture at worst.”

_“Understood.”_

They lapse into silence as Einarsson reads through the information. Abruptly, the door behind Jack slides open, and a new voice says: “There you are, I’ve been looking for you. Are you ready to go for dinner?”

Einarsson pauses his reading to ask, _“Who’s that?”_

Jack turns to Ana, who stands by the door, staring warily at the phone on the table.

“The only other person here who knows who I am,” Jack says simply. He ushers her inside and engages the door lock. “Markus, meet Ana Amari. Ana, this is Markus Einarsson.”

“The doctor,” Ana says, knowingly, taking Jack’s seat at the table. She folds her legs neatly under herself, the way she would when they’d go for meals together—Jack, Ana and Gabriel.

 _“One and the same,”_ replies Einarsson, by way of greeting. The doctor’s voice snaps Jack from his reverie, throwing him forward into the present as he says, _“It’s a pleasure to meet you, Ana.”_

“Likewise. I understand I have you to thank for keeping Jack alive all those years ago,” she says.

 _“Just as I have you to thank for keeping him alive now,”_ Einarsson counters. _“Keep up the good work. He’s trouble.”_

Ana laughs. “I plan to.”

“Well, this was a huge mistake,” Jack announces.

 _“Oh, Jack,”_ Einarsson says drolly. _“You have no idea.”_

They laugh as one, and Jack feels something settle in his gut. It feels a lot like contentment.

* 

A week later, a package arrives at Watchpoint: Gibraltar.

To the team’s bemusement—and Jack and Ana’s _amusement_ —it’s addressed to John Doe.

It’s heavy and cumbersome, so Jack cracks it open in the middle of the mess hall at breakfast. He’s surrounded by curious onlookers as he pulls off the lid of the crate, revealing row upon row of small, metal objects, and several pages of notes written in a doctor’s messy scrawl.

He recognizes the objects instantly as biotic emitters, a near perfect match to the prototype he found in Maryland. Einarsson’s notes go into detail on how to maintain and refill their existing stock—at least fifty canisters—as well as reverse-engineering the design to make more.

Jack hands the notes to Winston and the crate itself to Angela, both excited by the prospect of extra support in the field. He prises one of the canisters out of its foam inlay and holds it up to the gathered crowd, using the ripple of interest throughout the room to his advantage.

“Anyone interested in learning how to use one of these should meet me at the practice range in an hour,” he orders.

“And if you’re _not_ interested,” Ana adds sharply, “I suggest you change your mind.”

* 

It doesn’t take long for the recall team to double in size, faces both new and old taking up rank beside them. Sixteen active agents and a rotating schedule allows for a longer window between missions, giving Jack and his team a well-deserved break before their return to the field.

It also highlights the flaws in the existing design. Namely, training—or lack thereof.

Their ranks are full of capable fighters, experts in their respective fields of study, but there’s a distinct lack of team-based experience across the board that worries Jack, so much so that he brings it up to Winston, who saddles him with the job of fixing it.

The first few weeks are awful, with nobody willing to listen to anyone else. For a group of exceptional people who haven’t lost in a very long time, the failure hits them hard, but Jack is steadfast in his resolve. He sticks at it, pushing them to complete objectives harder and faster than ever before, until miscommunication is no longer an option—they _have_ to work together.

And they do. The motley group transforms before his eyes into the cogs of a well-oiled machine, working together almost seamlessly to achieve their objective. In doing so, Jack finds something he needed as well _._ Perspective. It wasn’t something he had as Strike Commander, which he recognizes now was a grievous error—high up the chain of command, practically in power, Jack got comfortable where he was, and in doing so forgot what it was like to be a soldier, a solitary man fighting for a cause he believed in.

Never again.

With renewed vigor, Overwatch finally wins more ground than it loses, pushing back insurgents both on the battlefield and in the media. They appeal to the public with their above-ground policies, emergency response teams and clean-up crews; it’s hard to find fault in their actions when they’re right beside the authorities, cleaning up debris and assisting in local reconstruction efforts.

Forward reconnaissance into Talon territory starts paying off, preventing a slew of civilian causalities. The fact that they’re actively liaising with the police and respecting sovereign borders helps allay the concern that another Blackwatch is brewing in the shadows.

It’s going so well that it isn’t until they’ve taken part in another successful debrief that Jack realizes what’s been putting him off about their recent successes.

 _Reaper_.

Reaper, who hasn’t been seen in public since the incident at the CDC.

Reaper, who hasn’t been seen in Jack’s dreams, either.

When only he, Ana, Winston and Reinhardt remain, Jack discovers he’s not the only one concerned by his absence, for Winston turns to them and says: “I think we should consider the possibility that Talon has accelerated their plans to take out Reaper, or have already done so.”

Reinhardt disagrees. “I am not so sure. Reaper is shrewd, bordering on paranoid. It’s equally possible he has discovered their duplicity and is keeping a low profile. We should not write him off just yet.”

“Without anything more to go on, it’s hard to say which is the more likely scenario,” Ana says diplomatically. “We’d best keep our ears to the ground, continue our assault on Talon and use whatever advantage we get.”

Jack remains silent throughout the discussion, lost in thought.

Thought that coalesces as they go their separate ways, following him through the halls and into his quarters. He activates the door lock as soon as he reaches the threshold, sealing him into the small, box-like room designated home. He peels off his leather jacket, tactical visor and face-plate almost mechanically, then perches on the edge of the bed to unclasp his shoes and ammo belt.

Meticulously, one layer at a time, he removes the guise of Soldier: 76, until there’s nothing left but Jack Morrison, who is the same man as the former, only worried and weary. As 76, Jack doesn’t get to be concerned—there’s no place for emotion on the battlefield, only the mission.

 _Hypocrite,_ sneers a voice in his head, pitched low and angry. _You threw the mission out the window the moment you saw Gabriel. You do the same for your team. You don’t suppress concern—you’re governed by it._

His fingers curl and uncurl in the coarse fabric of his fatigues, tapping out a rhythm into his knee— _one, two, one, three_ —until the voice goes silent. He breathes, focusing on the fit-to-burst feeling of the air in his lungs, followed by the inevitable exhale. When at last he’s regained some semblance of calm, he lies flat on the bed beneath him and tries not to think about anything at all, tracking instead the slow, steady beat of his heart in his chest, the way it pumps blood to the far corners of his body, keeping him alive.

In a state between sleeping and waking, Jack carves his intent into a bullet and lets it fly, feels it ricochet through his rib-cage until it disappears with an almighty _pull_ to its intended target.

The bond opens and for a single, terrifying instant, all Jack can feel is intense panic—panic that isn’t his own—until the walls are thrown back up, pushing him out and away, back to himself.

Jack doesn’t know how he feels about that. On one hand, Gabriel’s alive. The bond wasn’t closed by Jack’s volition, so it must have been him—the realization silences the malaise of tension in Jack's thoughts the way no words of reassurance ever could.

On the other hand, Gabriel might be alive, but if the bone-chilling panic Jack felt in those moments was anything to go by, he won’t be for long.

It’s no contest; Jack tries again.

He pushes at the wall sealing him off from Gabriel. It crumbles, haphazard and poorly-made. This time, when he activates the bond, he gets further, to the point where he can actually _see_ what Gabriel is doing—

_A choked-off scream as the knife tears through the skin of the man’s right shoulder, burrowing in through muscle, striking bone with a discordant, bloody note. He grins a too-wide smile at the sight, almost gleeful, filled with anticipation because this is it, this is the moment he—_

_He—_

_He pulls back._

_No._

_No he can’t._

_No he—_

“God,” Jack breathes, to an empty room and Gabriel both. “Look at him, he can’t be a day over sixteen. He’s just a boy, Gabriel!”

_His mind howls with the realization that he isn’t in control anymore. The boy seems to realize it too, for he’s stopped screaming now, looking up with pain-filled eyes at his captor, who has ceased hurting him in favor of turning his gaze inward, searching for the interloper who is attempting to govern his actions._

Jack grunts. “What the fuck are you doing, Gabriel? You _can’t._ ”

 _“I can,”_ says the voice inside, snarling. _“And I will. How is this any different to what you did to the Los Muertos gang, huh? It isn’t. You can’t stop me, Jack. I won’t allow you.”_

“Those men were armed; this one isn’t. Besides,” Jack argues. “You don’t have a say.”

His body thrums with determination, pushing against the bond until—

_—he turns to the boy, eyes wide, and says, “Go. Go now. While I still have control. Go!”_

_The boy just stares at him._

_“Get the hell out of here before I kill you!”_

_In the deep echo of Reaper’s voice, Jack’s words take on an extra edge of menace. It’s enough to force the boy into motion, propelling him out of the seat and across the room, slamming bodily into the door that buckles under the weight, opening for him, until he’s out into the city air, leaving nothing but a garish smear of red on the surface of the door. Fury roils in his bones, cresting, until Jack is blow off his feet, forced clean out of Gabriel’s body, into the ether and—_

Jack slams back into himself, eyes snapping open to the harsh light of his quarters, the antithesis of the dark corner of the world Gabriel had huddled in. Darkness coalesces in front of him, a shadow in the shape of a man, twisting from smoke into something solid, something _real._

In an instant, Jack is pinned flush to the bed, Reaper’s clawed hand around his throat, masked face inches away from his. He bears down, cutting off his air supply. Jack claws at his arm for purchase, desperate. Sunspots bloom across his vision, lungs burning from the lack of oxygen, stretching from ten seconds to twenty to thirty—

When he speaks, Reaper's voice is low and furious.

“You _idiot_. You have no idea what you’ve just done, what you’ve just cost me!”

Thirty-five seconds and he lets him go, relieving the pressure but keeping his hand firm against Jack’s neck. Jack pants into the curve of his wrist, throat aflame. His fingers clutch Reaper’s arm like a life-line.

“C-Couldn’t let you,” he croaks, then stops, tries again. The blow to his throat makes speaking painful, but he persists. “He was just a kid, Gabriel, and I know you—” He amends. “—or I used to.” He stares up at the twin slits in the mask and says, “You’d regret it.”

“Unlike you, I don’t _have_ the luxury of regret,” Reaper says hollowly. “Talon didn’t give two shits about his age when they recruited him, and neither can I, otherwise they’ll win. Do you _want_ them to kill me? Is that it?”

“You know I don’t,” Jack says.

The look on his face must reach the part of Reaper that’s still Gabriel because his chest caves, head bowing. Weariness worms into the cracks in his voice. “Your actions just signed my death warrant, Jack. The thug you just saved was my last chance at getting out from under Talon.”

Jack can feel his resignation through the bond. Knows he means every word he says. And yet, he still can’t bring himself to believe it.

“There has to be another way,” he argues.

“There isn’t,” Reaper says.

“There _is,_ ” Jack impresses.

He pushes up on his hand, holding tightly onto Reaper with the other, until he’s seated upright, Reaper straddling his thighs. Jack eyes the closeness between them with a mixture of fondness and regret and thinks that Gabriel is, as always, correct:

He doesn’t get to regret, so Jack does it for him.

He doesn’t get to _hope,_ so it seems Jack will have to do that as well.

Jack adds, “I have faith you’ll find it.”

“Faith won’t keep me alive,” he snaps, a hint of that old fire to his words. “It was a mistake coming here. Goodbye, Jack.”

“ _Wait—_ ”

Jack reaches out for him too late. The warmth drains to nothingness as he disappears in a rush of smoke and shadow, leaving both the room and Jack cold. The bond slams shut like the steel bars of a prison and Jack falls back to the bed, pain blooming across his forehead.

 _Okay,_ he thinks, stunned. _I deserved that._

* 

 _“Watch your back, 76!”_ Ana barks over the coms. There’s the sound of metal hitting metal, then a pained grunt directly behind Jack. _“Got him.”_

“My hero,” Jack grunts. He aims his pulse rifle at the agent in front of him, hiding behind a wooden crate. When they crane their head to look, he fires. The wood splinters and the man goes down.  _One less._

They’ve been fighting off goons for at least forty minutes, manning the perimeter while Tracer and Winston handle the extraction. Ana’s hidden away in some shadowy corner, seemingly everywhere at any given time. Pharah surveys the skies, eyes on the exits, reporting any suspicious activity to Jack and Torbjörn, whose automatic turrets have already saved their skin twice already.

“ _Movement on the perimeter,”_ Fareeha says over the coms. “ _I’m going to investigate.”_

“Acknowledged,” says Jack.

The feed cuts out all of a sudden, static and all, leaving Jack in eerie silence. It’s broken moments later when his visor beeps out a warning, a single word that sends a shiver down his spine:

HACKED _._

“What the—?”

Suddenly, the turret next to Jack starts firing.

At _him._

Jack curses and dives for cover behind the huge steel door. Torbjörn appears on at his side a moment later, looking agitated. He whispers heatedly to Jack, “What in the devil’s name is happening out there?”

“Hacked,” Jack murmurs, motioning to his visor. “Disabled my auto-aim and your turret. Whoever Talon’s sent us this time has just leveled the playing field. We need to take it back.”

“I agree,” says Torbjörn as he peers round the corner to aim at his own turret. Discomfort wrinkles his brow as he fires, hitting the combat inhibitor dead center, causing the turret to belch out smoke.

Jack feels a pang for the short man as he exclaims, “Atch! I hate this.”

“I’m with you,” Jack says.

Turret down, he emerges from cover with his tactical overlay initiated. The visor can’t aim but it can still locate; it gathers data on their specter, who apparently has the ability to disappear into thin air as well as hacking their systems.

“Damn it.”

 _“How’s it going out there, loves?”_ Tracer asks. “ _Winston’s got what we came for, we’re on route to the jet.”_

“Good timing,” Jack says as he shoots a helix rocket at the feet of an oncoming group of Talon soldiers, striking a few and sending the rest sprawling. “We’re making headway but there are... complications.”

_“Hang tight, okay? The cavalry's coming.”_

“Understood,” Jack says. He follows Torbjörn over to the smoking turret. “Think you can fix it?”

“Not sure I should even try,” Torbjörn admits. “It’s one more gun firing on us if it gets hacked again. Best cannibalize it for parts instead. Do you still have your armor?”

Jack pats himself down, assessing. “Mostly.”

“Here,” Torbjörn prompts, melting down the turret’s base components into a new armor plate for Jack.

“Thanks,” he says, sliding it into place on his rig.

Torbjörn grins.

Pharah appears as a streak of blue-gold high over their heads. _“Tango down,”_ she reports. _“That’s the last of them on the outer edges. Only the hacker and whoever made it inside the perimeter remain.”_

Ana backs up her claim from her vantage point. _“They are retreating.”_

“Retreating?” Jack repeats, frowning. He turns to look at Torbjörn, who is similarly confused by this. “That doesn’t make any sense _…_ ”

Pharah announces: “ _The hacker is in my sights, north-east quadrant. Taking her down.”_

“Wait!” Jack yells, only the transmission never sends.

Instead, a new voice cuts through their coms with a shrill cry—

_“¡Apagando las luces!”_

—and Jack is left gaping as a wall of energy surges out and _up_ from the north-east quadrant, encompassing the entire battlefield in a single, blinding instant before it disappears. The visor goes haywire as it hits him; the overlay cuts out completely. He hits the hard reset, but it will be several minutes before the system reboots.

His fingers curl around the trigger of his pulse rifle, aware of his vulnerability. He needs to be on guard.

A burst of static cuts through the coms, followed by a sound that makes Jack’s heart sink.

“Oh god no,” he breathes.

He spins on his heel, scanning the sky with wide eyes, trying to compensate for the lack of overlay.

Jack sees her.

Dread curls in his stomach as he watches the Raptora armor plummet to the ground. He’s on his feet in an instant, sprinting full-tilt towards it, knowing in his heart of hearts that he’ll arrive too late to—

_BOOM._

Pure, unadulterated fear lances through his body as he closes the distance between them. It takes a few tries to activate the throat-mic, fingers slipping on the button. There’s a veritable barrage of sound when he succeeds, but it’s drowned out by the urgency in his voice.

“Pharah is down! I repeat: Pharah is down!” Jack yells, throwing himself bodily towards her. He slams down a biotic emitter as soon as he’s within range, the yellow glow emanating in a field around them, setting warmth into his bones. Fareeha lets out a low moan from within the shell of her armor and Jack lists forward in relief. He does a once-over of her vitals, then reports: “She’s alive. Injured, but alive.”

Tracer breathes a heavy sigh of relief. _“Thank god.”_

 _“That’s good news, 76,”_ Winston adds. _“We’ve reached the transport. Heading to your location.”_

Ana says simply, “ _On my way.”_

To the untrained ear, her voice is hard, bordering on emotionless, but Jack knows better. There’s pain etched into every syllable of those three, curt words—worry and concern and sickness combined.

As he waits by Fareeha, ready to engage in cover fire if needed, Jack’s visor finishes the diagnostic and displays its results—the armor was hit by an EMP blast, knocked clean out of the sky by the concussion wave. The effects look to be temporary, but the blow caused a malfunction in the helmet. He leans over and pulls it off her face, tucking it in the groove between her neck and shoulder.

“Uhg.” Fareeha’s eyes open to slits, staring up at him. They track the path of his arm to his hand, holding fast to her damaged flank, before returning to his mask. “Did we win?”

Jack surveys the empty battlefield. He can’t say for certain, but he nods. If they were retreating, this was meant as a distraction to them. A very painful, very sinister distraction.

A small smile illuminates her face.

“Mum’s freaking out, isn’t she?”

“She’s on her way,” Jack confirms, inclining his head to look at her.

Fareeha rolls her eyes. “Definitely freaking out.”

Unseen behind his mask, Jack smiles. The air of relief that surrounds him, however—that’s palpable, even to Fareeha. An armored gauntlet comes to rest atop Jack’s hand. Squeezes.

“Thank you,” she utters. “For staying with me.”

“You’re welcome,” Jack replies, and together they wait.

*

Jack finds Ana on the ramparts.

They’re too alike that way, each imbued with the same, old-soldier instinct to man the perimeter, watching for a sign of trouble. He pities any poor soul that tries it—their wrath is a terrible thing, fueled by years of waiting, _wanting_.

Once they’ve got a target in their sights, there’s no escaping them.

“I’m sorry,” is the first thing he says as he moves to stand beside her. She tilts her head just so, an acknowledgement of his apology, and an expression of her interest as to what, exactly, he’s apologizing for. “For dragging you into my mess,” he explains. “Until today, I hadn’t realized how self-centered I was being, and how bad a friend I was.”

As he speaks, he unclips the face-plate, pulls the visor off with it. The area isn’t covered on Gibraltar’s surveillance grid, hence their need to keep watch of it. His secret is safe here.

Ana turns to face him, a smile playing on her lips. “I accept your apology,” she says. “It’s all right, Jack.”

“It’s not,” he argues, then steps forward and hugs her.

She sighs into his collarbone, tension leaking from her tired frame. “No, it’s not,” she agrees.

“I’m here to listen,” Jack promises as they part.

“I may just take you up on that,” she says, looking down at her hands. She walks to the edge of the ramparts, taking hold of the railing with a white-knuckled grip, peering down the cliff-side to the ocean below. Jack follows after her, turning his back on the view to watch her instead.

When she speaks, her voice is tight, as if choked by emotion.

“I’m… I’m so proud of her, Jack,” Ana admits, equal parts joy and sorrow. “She’s so strong, and she’s learned that all on her own, without her mother. I’m not even sure I have the right to call myself that.”

“Of course you do,” Jack implores, unable to abide her throwing herself to the wolves. “She might not understand it now, but everything you did, even—even dying, you did that for her. To protect her.”

Ana looks at him sharply, mouth pursed in a hard line. Her eyes are full of pain and anger.

“How much of that is true, I wonder? And how much do you say to reassure yourself that the choices _you_ made were the right ones?”

She shakes her head, the flames of her anger burning to embers, her hand reaching out to grasp his in silent apology for the harshness of her words. Ana closes her eyes against the sea wind, holds tight to Jack’s hand like an anchor.

“I thought I was doing the right thing, all those years ago, and I was for me. But once you become a parent, you forfeit the right to think about yourself in that way because you’re no longer just one person. If what’s right for you isn’t right for your child, you go back and try again. I convinced myself, long ago, that leaving would allow Fareeha a shot at a normal life, away from the danger I put her in simply by existing. I couldn’t stop thinking: _what if it was her?_ What if she was the one shot down by Widowmaker that day? What if Talon decided that in order to get to Overwatch—in order to get to _me_ —they’d take her down first?” She looks at Jack then, brown eyes wide and imploring. “I couldn’t let that happen, and when I saw the opportunity, I let that fear drive me and I took it.

“I was a coward,” she says. “Instead of owning my fear, I allowed it to own me. And look at the result—Fareeha is in just as much danger as she was when I was there, perhaps more so. She still believes in heroes, in her ability to be one—and she’s right. of course she’s right, she’s courageous and strong and so beautiful, but I can’t shake the fear that it’s going to get her killed.” She laughs bitterly. “Even after all of these years, all that distance, I’m still afraid. Today was—today was too close, Jack.”

“It was,” he replies immediately, because it needs to be said. For the rest, Jack allows the silence to blanket them for several minutes before he speaks again. He chooses his words carefully, aware that even the slightest misstep could be catastrophic.

“You’re right,” he says, “I’m not a parent; I have no idea what that must feel like. But I know a lot about disappearing acts and disappointing the people you care about the most. If you ask me, you’ve already done the best thing you can for her just by being here, as yourself, authentically. She might not want you, but she needs you. So help her. Fight beside her, watch her back. If someone’s gunning for her, get to them first.”

He squeezes her hand. “Be her friend and you just might get another shot at being her mother.”

Ana exhales heavily, and Jack can see the moment her panic ebbs away with it.

She smiles at him, her eyes bright.

“Thank you,” she says openly.

He blinks, and for a moment he’s back on the battlefield, a warm hand over his, Fareeha having uttered the same words to him then as Ana has now. The weight of them carries from daughter to mother, the same tone and inflection, the same sincerity.

“You’re welcome,” he replies, returning her smile with one of his own, unshakably fond.

“I fear for Fareeha, but it isn’t her I worry about,” she says, casting her eyes back out over the horizon. The statement settles between them. Jack wants to ask what she means by it but waits, trusting her to tell him herself. After a moment, she does, eyes never leaving the skyline.

“You feel it, don’t you? You always do, long before anyone else. Gabriel and I used to joke that we’d never need to watch the sky—we’d just watch you instead. And when we saw it, that’s when we'd know. There’s always a downpour when the farmer’s boy braces for rain.”

Slowly and deliberately, Ana turns to watch him. Her hand finds his forearm, the muscles beneath clenched tight. She sucks in a breath and asks, “What do you see, Jack?”

He looks out across the ocean. The sun has long since slunk into hiding and the sky is blanketed by stars. There isn’t a cloud in sight. It’s a clear, crisp and cool evening. Perfect in every way.

“What I see is one hell of a storm,” he says, with a calm that belies his words, “and it’s coming our way.”

*

Like every storm, it hits hard, fast and strikes right where he lives.

Alone in his quarters, Jack jolts as if struck, seemingly for no reason at all. He dismisses it as a one-off except it happens again, like a spark under his skin. It skirts the periphery of his thoughts, this electric awareness. He closes his eyes to focus on the sensation, only for it to melt back into the darkness; the sunspot residue of its light lingers on his eyelids, glittering like the fallout of some far-off explosion.

He reaches out, and then—

Jack opens his eyes. He’s at his desk, which is not unusual of him, but there’s a pen in his hand that he doesn’t remember picking up. His fingers are smudged with ink, black droplets on calloused, pale skin. Jack rubs it with his thumb and it lifts easily. The ink is still fresh.

Head buzzing, Jack looks down at the desk.

Scribbled on a pad in his handwriting is the address of a motel in Algeciras.

Below it, a message:

> _ROOM 202. COME ALONE AND BRING A MED-KIT._
> 
> _HURRY._

He’s on his feet in seconds, moving through the room like in a whirlwind as he grabs his visor, field gear and motorcycle jacket. The route to Medical is one he’s traveled countless times before, often in some state of disarray, so the sight of him stalking towards Angela’s office, hair disheveled and body thrumming with tension, isn’t unusual; the few people he passes in the halls give him a wide berth.

Angela straightens as he enters, setting down her data-pad to give him her full attention. Her warm smile falters slightly at the aura of restlessness that surrounds him. Surprise and concern war for dominance in her voice. “Soldier: 76. What can I do for you?”

Jack looks at her and sees double. Angela as she is now—a woman in her thirties, as smart as she is beautiful—versus Angela as she was the day they met—a teenager, shy yet driven, out to make her mark on the world. He thinks of what that girl would say to him now and hesitates.

“I… need a favor.”

“All right,” Angela says slowly, girl and woman both. “What is it?”

She rises, walking past him to close the office door softly. When the latch clicks, Jack’s world readjusts itself and the girl is gone. Only the woman remains, directing him to take a seat in front of her.

“I need to borrow a med-kit,” Jack says quickly as he sits.

To her credit, Angela doesn’t outwardly react. “Why’s that?”

Jack deflects. “There’s something I have to do in town. It’ll only take a few hours, but I need to go now.”

“Alone?” she asks, frowning. He nods and the look deepens. “I’m not sure I can let you do that. You’re still a wanted man, 76. The press can’t argue when you’re out with us, but on your own…”

Jack sighs. “I know, and any other lead I’d be calling in. But I have to do this alone, Ang. I need you to trust me on this.” He runs a hand through his hair, frustrated and resigned in equal measure. “But I can't ask you to do that, not like this.”

“Like what?”

“ _Strangers_.”

She softens, misunderstanding him. “You aren’t a stranger, 76, and I do trust you.” Her lips quirk. “We’ve fought together, it comes with the territory. I just don’t understand why you think it’s necessary to do this on your own.”

“I know,” Jack says again, and raises his hands to unclasp his mask.

Angela aborts the motion with the curl of her delicate hand around his wrist. He looks at her through the visor, catalogs the hard line of her mouth, the seriousness in her eyes.

“Think about what you’re doing here. You put that mask on for a reason. We respect that here.”

“I know you do,” Jack says, unable to disguise the fondness in his voice. “It's okay. I want to.”

Angela releases him and leans back in her chair. She nods, silent permission for him to proceed.

He thumbs the release clips on the face-plate and pulls it and the visor away from his face. He’s close enough to gauge her reaction without his glasses; her eyes rove his scarred and weathered face, recognition bleeding across her own.

She breathes his name— _“Jack_ ”—and the sheer emotion in that single-syllable word hits him like a freight train at full force. Her shock and sorrow are palpable, hanging heavy in the air between them.

“Hey,” Jack says, tiredly. He tries for a smile but misses the mark.

It’s a testament to Angela’s strength of will—and the hardships of her profession—that she regains herself so quickly. A chagrined smile twists her lips. “Oh, am I going to be _furious_ with you later, but for now…”

She shakes her head. Her eyes are bright when she says, “I’m just happy you’re alive.”

She closes the space between them and hugs him. There’s a strange juxtaposition to the way he hugged Ana on the ramparts, Jack being twice her size but folded into Angela’s arms like a child. He grips her, something akin to desperation on his tongue. It feels painful and raw.

It feels like deliverance.

“Me too,” he says quietly, and it’s the first time he’s admitted it to anyone, even to himself.

Angela pulls back, face soft with unguarded affection for him. She reaches for his mask, testing the weight of it in her hands. The light behind her illuminates her shape like some sort of preternatural being, and if he were religious, he’d say the way she replaces the mask on his face is like a benediction. Her hands linger on the kevlar as it slides home, her smile achingly fond.

They were friends once, Jack Morrison and Angela Ziegler. There may be hope for them yet.

Angela crosses the room in quick, short steps to scan her access card at the store-room door, disappearing through the threshold. When she returns, she’s carrying a med-kit, and it takes every ounce of willpower Jack has not to cry out in relief at the sight of it.

“Promise me something,” she prompts, holding the kit out for him to take.

Jack places his hands on the smooth, metal surface of the box and says, “Anything.”

“Come back,” she says.

He doesn’t speak, simply reaches out to tap the pulse-point on her wrist. Angela's body caves instantly, relaxing at the touch.

In the dead of night during an op—where it was too dark to see each other’s faces and they didn’t dare light a beacon for fear of attracting enemy attention—a single tap meant: _I’m okay._

“A few hours,” she reminds him. He nods. “Then you’ll tell me what this is all about?”

Jack pauses at the door. “It’s not my secret to tell, but I’ll do my best.”

“That’s all I ask,” Angela says. “And Jack? _Be careful_.”

With a final nod, he’s gone.

* 

Without the reverberating hum of his bike's engine, the evening in Algeciras is silent and still. Almost eerie. Jack shoulders the backpack containing Angela’s med-kit and dismounts the bike, crossing the dimly-lit parking lot with short, quick steps.

He finds the room in an alcove on the far left side of the motel. The rendering around the door is weathered and cracked, the building itself just shy of dilapidated. His heavy boots leave footprints on the ground from the dust on the road; he shakes it off when he reaches the doormat by Gabriel’s room, watching the ultra-fine particles drift to the floor.

He’s stalling. Fear’s frantic knife-edge bites at his skin, sharp and paralyzing, when he raises his hand to knock.

 _It's bad,_ a voice in his mind whispers.  _It has to be. He never would have called you otherwise._

Jack runs a hand through his short crop of hair, tugs hard at the silvering strands. The pressure serves to ground him and the thrall of the voice falls away. Before he can rethink it, he curls his fingers into a fist and raps on the door sharply.

It happens quickly, even for Jack’s super-fast reflexes. One moment, he’s standing in front of the closed door, eyes fixed on the triple digit number embossed on its surface. The next, he’s inside, back flush against the peeling wall, pinned into place by Reaper’s spiked gauntlets.

The first thing he notices is the grip. It’s weak compared to all the other times they’ve grappled; it would be all too easy for him to break it, which is why he doesn’t. Rather, he uses the close proximity to study the other man uninhibited… and doesn’t like what he sees.

There’s blood, slick and red, across the edges of the bone-white mask. Smoke billows from the slits as Reaper lists to the side, favoring his left leg. The bond between them rattles in discontent, setting off a chain of alarm bells in Jack’s head that culminates in his hands coming to rest over Reaper’s gloved fingers, pulling. Something in the touch must resonate with him, because he relinquishes his hold.

He moves to pull away but Jack holds fast onto his hands, grip tight as the words echo from his mouth like the roar of distant thunder, angry and desperate: “What happened?”

Gabriel snaps back, “What do you _think_ happened?”

Cold fire ignites through Jack’s body like vibrations on a wire. He grits his teeth.

“Talon.”

Gabriel grunts dismissively, words slurring. “You want a prize or something? Dios _…_ ”

Jack’s there when he crumbles, looping a black-clad arm around his shoulders and pulling them both to the bed on the far side of the room.

Gabriel groans, a guttural sound. “This is your fault, you son of a bitch.” The words are belied by the way he sinks his weight into Jack, clutching at him like a lifeline. “I wouldn’t even be in this mess in the first place if it wasn’t for you. If you hadn’t let that asshole go—”

His rant devolves into a fit of deep, hacking coughs, wet and miserable. Jack sets him down on the bed.

“Lie back,” he says, when the coughing stops.

It's a testament to how bad it is that Gabriel does as he’s told, resting back against the mattress with a pained sigh.

Jack pushes aside the swathes of thick, black leather to find the clasps holding it all in place. He undoes them slowly, telegraphing his movements to the prone Reaper until at last the armor yields beneath his hands. He loosens it considerably but doesn’t take it off just yet, sitting back to listen to the sickly draw of air in Gabriel's lungs as he breathes unimpeded by its weight.

There’s one thing left to do. “I need to remove the mask.”

“ _No._ ”

They both pretend not to notice how Gabriel’s voice shakes. Jack rubs his temples, willing away the irritation that lingers front and center in his thoughts. It won’t do him any good; Gabriel is just as stubborn as he is. He has to appeal to the man’s logic.

“You called me here for a reason,” says Jack. “You need help, and there’s nowhere else you can go to get it that won’t turn you away or sic the feds on you. I’m your best chance at getting back on your feet, but in order for me to help you, I need you to take off the mask. And I need you to trust me.” He sighs heavily. “I’m not doing this to humiliate you, despite what you think.”

Gabriel sounds lost when he says, “I don’t. Think that.”

“Then _why_?”

There’s a long pause before he receives his answer.

“I’m not the man you remember.”

Jack snorts. “Good, because neither am I.”

“I mean it,” he argues, “I’m not— _human_. Not when I’ve gone this long without energy.”

“You feel pretty human to me,” Jack says, motioning to his hand on Gabriel's chest. He’s aware he’s being obtuse, but he can’t handle the sound of self-loathing in his voice. It isn’t right, not for Gabriel, who always took such pride in the way he looked—and was magnificent for it.

A hand shoots out to grab Jack’s wrist.

“ _Jack,_ ” he growls.“I’m warning you because this is some grade-a body horror bullshit, not because I’m insecure about my looks. It’s… pretty fucked up under here.”

Jack squares his jaw.

“It doesn’t matter,” he says, because it doesn’t. “I’m not going anywhere.”

Gabriel drops his head back to the mattress and laughs. “After all this time, you’re still the golden boy with a bleeding heart. You’re a walking trope, Jack.” Suddenly, he sobers. “And I’m the nightmare that follows you.”

“Nightmares don’t get beaten within an inch of their life,” Jack counters, returning to the uniform despite the hand around his wrist. He pulls the hood of the heavy coat back and away from Gabriel's face, eyes tracking his dark curls, tacky with blood and sweat.

His fingers skirt the edges of the mask, looking for the release catch.

“Jack,” Gabriel starts, and the hand on his wrist tightens imperceptibly.

He stills, fighting to keep his voice level when he asks, “What is it?”

But that’s all Gabriel says. His name. He releases his hand with a resigned sigh and swallows.

“Go ahead.”

Jack’s fingers seek purchase against the smooth lines of the mask. He finds the release, flicks it, then retracts the face-plate. From behind the pane of his tactical visor, Jack can see every inch of Gabriel’s exposed face in crisp, perfect detail. He blinks at the sight. Frowns.

Gabriel looks…

 _Normal_.

In fact, he looks like he hasn’t aged a day since they last saw each other face-to-face (as opposed to mask-to-mask); all dark skin and darker hair, features scarred and rough but also lived-in, experienced _;_ the crow’s feet in the corners of his eyes a testament to happier times, countered by the downward turn of his mouth, the clench of his strong jaw. The only real difference is his eyes—a deep, carmine red, replacing the brown of Jack’s memory, burning like hell-fire in the low light of the room.

“I don’t—” Jack cuts himself off as his eyes fly to the play of muscle beneath his hands, fraught with tension, a ripple of smoke belching over the collar of Gabriel's coat. Something inside Jack clicks and he draws back in horror. “Are you—holding yourself together? Oh god, _Gabriel_ …”

He explains. “With enough focus, I can keep myself looking like this. Like I used to.”

“Well _don’t_ ,” Jack impresses. “You need the energy to heal.”

“That’s just it, I _can’t_ heal.” A look at Jack’s masked face and he frowns. “It’s the same poison, only it wasn’t an accident this time. I’m stuck in a loop of—of dismantle and repair, pulling apart and coming back together again. As long as it’s in my system, I’ll just keep getting worse. Until I get the bullet out, I'm stuck like this.”

“Where?" Jack utters.

“Back of the head,” Gabriel replies stiffly, then huffs a humorless laugh. “At least I remembered to form a skull this time.”

 _This time?_ “Jesus Christ,” he breathes, trying—failing—to take this all into stride. Gabriel was right when he said he didn’t understand. How can he? How can _anyone_? He swallows back against the lump in his throat. “Alright. Let me see it.”

As Gabriel shifts to lie on his stomach, Jack readies the med-kit, strips off his jacket and gloves and wipes his hands. He perches with one knee on the edge of the bed, hovering over Gabriel’s prone form, and studies the wound. It’s gruesome, but nothing he hasn’t seen before.

Operated on is another story entirely. Sure, he dug out the occasional piece of shrapnel during the Omnic Crisis, but never this deep and never from somebody’s _head._ He wonders whether a localized anesthetic will be enough or if he’ll need to knock him out.

Be it bond or intuition, Jack can’t say, but Gabriel follows his train of thought and snaps, “Forget that. Get on with it, Jack.”

His voice is steel, hard and unyielding. Jack, sensing the futility in further argument, scrubs up and gets to work.

It takes time to locate the bullet, a process made stranger by the fact that Gabriel _directs_ him. He must have a way of controlling the blood flow, because there’s barely any of it, even as Jack digs in with the apparatus. Twenty minutes of careful probing later, he pries the warped bullet free from ragged flesh, throwing it into the stainless steel dish by the bed. It’s mangled but in one piece, so Jack activates the biotic emitter at his hip to accelerate the healing process as he cleans and stitches the wound.

Gabriel breathes deeply from his position on the bed, relief written into the lines of his back. Jack cleans up around him, bagging the bullet, figuring if Gabriel won’t look into it, he will.

Once finished, he looks down at his hands and undershirt, covered in blood and grime, and sighs.

“Mind if I borrow your shower?”

Gabriel grunts by way of reply, which Jack takes as a yes.

He leaves him to doze, closing the bathroom door behind him and switching on the shower as he undresses. He steps into the curtain of steaming hot water, feels it hammer into his muscles, dissolving the tension there bit by aching bit.

For the first time since he received Gabriel’s message, Jack slows down, allowing the events of the day—and beyond—to wash over him. He closes his eyes beneath the spray and wonders what happens next. For him, for Gabriel, for the world.

Jack stays under until the water runs cold. He pulls a towel off the rack, wraps it around his waist and surveys his clothes. The undershirt is a write-off, so he throws it into the refuse bag that came with the kit, slipping right into his shirt and jacket instead.

He’s toweling off his hair when he steps out of the bathroom, visor in his free hand, blinking at the lack of depth perception to his sight. He stops in the threshold of the door, body going rigid, as if realizing something his brain has not. When his eyes catch up, Jack’s mouth falls open and he swears.

Gabriel is gone.

His uniform sits in sprawled heap on the floor, but the man himself is nowhere in sight. Jack calls out to him on a whim, receives no answer.

_Shit._

“I don’t understand you.”

His head jars painfully against the wall as he’s ushered back by Gabriel, who materializes out of nowhere to stand directly in his space. Jack scowls in his general direction and says, “You’re going to give me a concussion if you keep that up.” Then: “Where did you go just now?”

But Gabriel continues as if Jack hadn’t spoken, head tilted, eyes hot like embers, “I don't understand you, and now I’m not sure I ever have. Every time I think I’ve figured you out, you go and do something that turns it all on its head.”

Hands come up to bracket Jack's head. Gabriel leans in close, pinning him with a look, desperation and anger warring for dominance in his words.

“I can’t quantify the difference, Jack. It doesn’t add up. You abandoned me in Zurich, left me to become this—this _thing._ ” He motions to the smoke that curls from his breath, twining gently in the air in front of them. “You play boy-scout but you’re just as ruthless as I am. I’ve watched you write things off as a tactical necessity, then turn around and tell me it isn’t _fair_ to kill someone who wants my head. You say you want to help me, but you seem to do your very best to get me killed.”

Jack bristles, but Gabriel just shakes his head. Something passes over his face, something Jack—with his impeded vision—can’t quite catch. “If that was it, I wouldn’t have called you here. You saved my life. You warned me about Talon’s plans and you gave me an out. You took away my pain, asked for nothing in return. You came when I called.”

He makes a frustrated sound in his throat.

“What I’m trying to say is—I don’t know what to believe anymore,” he admits. His hands find his hair, fingers twining in deep, brown curls. He looks away. “Once, you were my north star. I’d have done anything for you if you had just asked. Then you took everything from me, you left me behind and I hated you. I hated you so much I wanted to _kill you._ I didn’t think that would ever change. And now that it has, I’m back at the beginning, trying to figure out what the hell you want from me.”

Through the haze, Jack looks at him, a man whose face he’s known for almost his whole life, caged in a body that is burns and drowns in equal measure. There’s only one answer he can think of that encompasses what he feels for this man, the length and breadth of this near-limitless connection.

Jack looks at him, mouth dry, eyes unfocused, and says, “Everything.”

Gabriel frowns. _“What?”_

“You asked me what I want,” he says. “I want everything.”

Surprise bleeds into the worn lines of his face as he searches Jack’s, looking for the lie. Only there isn’t one. Jack isn’t lying, and some part of him must realize that, for his expression changes, replaced by something softer, almost vulnerable.

“Only you, Morrison,” he says, but the words are soft. Fond. “Only you.”

He touches a finger to his lips, considering. Then, as if making a decision, he pulls something from his pocket and slips it over Jack’s eyes.

The detail in Gabriel's face snaps into sudden, jarring focus. He’s dressed in loose-fitting fatigues, looking leagues better than before; he sees the expression on Jack’s face and laughs. “Don’t say I do nothing for you, güero.”

Jack reaches up to touch the glasses in abject wonder. They’re his first pair, the black anti-flash wraparounds that Einarsson made for him while he was in hospital. The same glasses, Jack realizes, that he wore in his— _their_ —dream. He frowns.

“Did you break into the Overwatch base just to get these?”

Gabriel nods down to the visor in Jack’s hand, skirting the question. “Quid pro quo. If I go without my mask, so do you. But I know you can’t see properly without it, so I brought you these. Besides.” Something in his voice shifts. “I want you to see this.”

Jack finds himself trapped between twin arms, all corded muscle and scarred, brown skin. Anticipation pools low in his gut as he searches Gabriel’s face for an indication of what to expect, and finds nothing.

“See what?”

The question seems to shatter what little composure Gabriel has. He leans in and captures Jack’s lips in a scorching kiss.

His mouth is warm and slick, red irises blazing in the relative darkness as he watches Jack through heavy-lidded eyes. His hands curl in Jack’s still damp hair as he kisses him, tugging it in a way that makes him see stars. It also breaks whatever spell has come over him, hands mooring at Gabriel’s side as he surges forward to kiss him back with a desperation that takes him by surprise and makes Gabriel smile against his lips, biting down sharply before chasing away the sting with his tongue.

 _“Fuck_ ,” Jack breathes when they part.

“That can be arranged,” Gabriel says.

He ushers Jack away from the wall and onto the bed. Jack follows in a daze, caught in how surreal this moment is, jolting a little as his back hits the mattress. Gabriel leans over him, recapturing Jack in the cage of his arms. His fingers ghost the edges of Jack’s glasses, pulling them up and off his face.

“How much can you see like this?” he asks, voice pitched low and soft.

“Enough,” Jack says.

Gabriel nods, leaning down on his forearms, so close now his gaze flickers from one side of Jack’s face to the other. He presses those lips against his neck where the skin meets the fabric of his shirt. Jack loses himself to the sensation, Gabriel’s weight above him bearing down, the graze of teeth across his collarbone and the persistent burn of his arousal hot and bright in his stomach.

The bond hums like a thing alive between them, nourished by their close proximity to one another. Jack knows he should argue, remind him they’re barely on speaking terms let alone… whatever _this_ is, but there’s a closeness that resonates through the bond—a warmth trickling through Jack and into Gabriel—that he can’t bring himself to take away. Not when he’s already taken so much.

Jack reaches for the back of Gabriel’s head to draw him in closer and balks at the realization that it’s completely healed, that the wounds along his body are in the process of healing as well, closing before his very eyes. Gabriel kisses him again, straight on the mouth, then rests his forehead against Jack’s, panting softly into the space between them. Jack is thunderstruck, by both the revelation _and_ the kiss.

“Shit,” Gabriel pants. “What was that?”

“The bond, I think.”

“ _Shit,_ ” Gabriel says again, and pulls back.

He glances down at Jack, looking exactly like he did in their shared dream. A little older, maybe, a little wearier, definitely, but undeniably _him._ Jack tries to commit every detail to memory—the indent in Gabriel’s lips and the rasp of his facial hair against his skin; the outer ring of his irises, where the red gives way to his natural brown; the way his mouth goes slack at the sight of him, eyebrows furrowed.

There’s an itch in Jack’s fingers that’s sated only by carding them through Gabriel’s thick curls, fingernails scraping his scalp. Gabriel hums low in his throat, eyes flickering shut.

“I still need energy,” he says, arcing into Jack’s touch, “but the hunger isn’t so bad anymore. I think it’ll keep, at least for a few more days.” He reopens his eyes, leveling Jack with a wry look. “Before you ask, _boy-scout,_ I only feed on people who deserve it.”

Jack grins. “I wasn’t going to say anything.”

“Right,” Gabriel scoffs, but leans into him anyway, kissing Jack deeply. His fingers play against the edge of his shirt, dipping beneath to touch the hot band of skin there.

“Don’t start something you don’t intend to finish,” Jack mumbles against his lips. He makes no other move to stop the probing fingers. He runs his own down the length of Gabriel’s back, relishing in the full-body shudder he receives in response.

“I could say the same to you,” comes the amused reply.

Gabriel’s the first to pull away, as Jack knew he would. He rolls over to the other side of the bed with a soft grunt, prodding Jack hard in the ribs as he moves. Jack laughs to disguise the ache in his chest—not because it hurt, but because it’s exactly the sort of thing they used to do when they were friends, in the nebulous _before._ He’s struck with the realization that he doesn’t know what they are now, caught between something more and something less.

Jack’s eyes track Gabriel as he pads across the room, opening cabinets until he finds the one with the mini-fridge. He pulls out a bottle of water, taking a long, slow drag before throwing it to Jack.

Jack catches it, takes a sip. The water is cool and fresh on his tongue. He swallows it down, takes another.

“So,” Gabriel says, casually.

Jack glances over the rim of the bottle at him, instantly suspicious. The feeling only intensifies as Gabriel folds himself onto the bed with a grace that belies his build, leaving a foot of space between them, and leers at him. “How do you plan on getting me out of this mess?”

“What mess?” Jack asks.

“You told me to have an out,” he reminds him. “You’re it.”

“ _Fuck me,_ ” Jack gapes. “You never do things by halves, do you, Reyes?”

“Planning on it and no, I don’t,” he says smoothly.

“I…” Jack pauses, feeling the heat seep into his face. “God damn it, I walked right into that one.”

Gabriel nods sagely, the little shit. “You did.”

Jack levers up onto his forearms and shuffles so his back hits the headboard. He considers the water bottle in his hands, tilting it this way and that, peeling back the thin label. Stalling.

“Jack?”

He looks up. “If you want my protection, you'll have to turn yourself in.”

“That’s suicide,” Gabriel says flatly, pursing his mouth into a hard line. He shakes his head and the muscles in his jaw flutter, tense. “They’ll never let me live. On the off chance they don’t kill me on sight, they’ll imprison me, torture me or _worse_ , hand me over to Mercy _then_ kill me.”

Jack’s lips twitch. “No, they won’t.”

“You can’t know that,” Gabriel points out, disturbed by his levity.

“I do.”

_“How?”_

Jack eyes the stubborn set of that strong jaw and sighs.

Then, he fists the fabric of his long-sleeved shirt at the collar and pulls it over his head. It’s worth it just to see the shock bloom across Gabriel’s face, the way his eyes trail Jack's bare chest before flying up to meet his.

“If you think that’s going to change my mind,” he says dryly, “you’re wrong.”

“I know,” Jack says, and this time he smiles properly, the motion tugging the scar on his top lip.

He takes Gabriel’s right wrist in his and turns it over, tilting it up into the light. Engraved into the skin there are five black letters, barely visible against the backdrop of his skin. LXXVI.

_Seventy-six._

Gabriel’s eyes fly from his wrist to Jack’s face, trepidation ricocheting through the bond as Jack places his hand against his left bicep. He tilts his arm so they can see the soul-mark and feels rather than hears Gabriel’s sharp intake of breath as his fingers brush the edge of the mask tattoo.

The look on Gabriel’s face is dark, like the coming of a storm—not from anger, but something else. Something deeper, something primal. It’s reigned in a moment later, like all of Gabriel’s missteps, but the vestiges linger in his dilated eyes, riveted to the mark on Jack’s arm.

“This is how I get you in,” Jack explains, breath stuttering as Gabriel’s fingers skate his skin. “Half of Overwatch may be out for your head, but they’re good people who know better than to argue an active soul-bond. Given the right moment, and the right approach, I know they’ll come around.” He smiles slightly. “Besides, I’m not the only one vouching for you.”

Gabriel hums, but his eyes don’t leave the mark.

“Ana,” he says.

Jack nods.

He sees the flint in Gabriel’s mind strike a spark of interest, and Jack knows he’s won. The thought takes hold, spark spreading into a raging inferno. He looks at Jack. “Say I believe you—what’s the play?”

“I go in and inform the team. Alone.”

“Obviously,” Gabriel says, rolling his eyes. His fingers stroke the Reaper’s mask on Jack’s bicep distractedly. “Despite the getup, I don’t actually have a death wish. What else?”

“We’ll meet in two days’ time at these coordinates,” Jack says, pulling the piece of paper Gabriel used to summon him out of his pants pocket and motioning to the numbers on the back. He hesitates before handing them over. “This is classified information. I’m trusting you not to reveal this to Talon or the authorities—I’m still a vigilante, despite my ties to Overwatch.”

“I won’t sell you out, Jack,” he says, seriously.

Jack exhales the breath he was holding. It shouldn’t be this easy to believe him, but he does. Damn it all, he does.

“If all goes according to plan, I’ll bring you in and we’ll go from there.”

Gabriel hums. “And if it _doesn’t_ go according to plan?”

“You get the hell out of dodge,” Jack says simply. “You leave and you don’t come back. Here.” He hands Gabriel a card. “If things go south, call this number. Tell them who you are— _exactly_ who you are—and follow their instructions. They’ll take care of it.”

“Who?” Gabriel asks, with a touch of suspicion.

Jack shakes his head. “I can’t tell you that. Not yet. Suffice it to say, they’re a friend.”

“Yours or Overwatch?”

“Mine. They’ll help, you have my word on that.”

“Your word, huh? Quid pro quo again,” says Gabriel, his lips twitching into an approximation of a smile. He stares down at the card, small white numbers on a black background. “This is me trusting you.”

Jack nods. “That’s how friendship tends to work, yes.”

The smile vanishes. For a long moment, Jack’s stuck wondering if what he said was wrong.

But Gabriel just sighs and says, “Took us long enough.”

Relief crashes upon Jack like the waves on Gibraltar's shoreline, sweeping away everything else in its path.

“Yeah,” he says, unable to hide the warmth in his voice. “It did.”

“It’s getting late. You’d better go,” Gabriel says, still looking at the card.

Jack watches him, the absent look in his eyes and the undercurrent of tension in his shoulders. He thinks back to his previous thought of being caught between something more and something less and wonders if this is the first step to changing that. If they even can change it.

 _I have to try,_ he thinks.

“Hey,” he says, softly, in a bid to get Gabriel’s attention. He looks up, first at the soul-mark then at Jack, something simmering in the otherworldly glow of his eyes.

Jack leans in and kisses him on the mouth, hard enough to leave them breathless.

“Two days,” he promises.

He watches Gabriel return—the absent look fading, the tension bleeding away—and thinks perhaps he’s done something right for a change.

“Two days,” Gabriel agrees, and smiles.

*

It’s dark when Jack leaves the motel, straddling his motorcycle and gunning the engine, which comes to life with a loud thrum that resounds through his entire body. There’s movement in the corner of his eye as he peels away from the roadside, tactical visor enhancing the shot to reveal Gabriel, arms crossed, body lax against the threshold of the door, watching him go with an inscrutable expression on his face.

Once they’d agreed on the plan, there wasn’t much more to say, and Jack wasn’t willing to overstay his welcome. In hindsight, it feels a lot like cowardice, but he isn’t prepared to discuss their newfound intimacy just yet, unable to shake the feeling that if he did, he’d lose it.

The coastal wind tugs at his hair and clothes as he hits the main road at speed, eyeing the smudge on the horizon that is Watchpoint: Gibraltar. As he closes the distance, Jack relaxes into the ride, lulled by the salt-water smell, the crashing of the waves against cliffs miles below.

Then, and only then, does he allow himself to think of what just happened.

Away from the glow of lamplight on Gabriel’s umber skin and the warmth of their shared breathing, Jack thinks that perhaps this is what was supposed to happen all those years ago—and all along, really. That strange, electric tension that had always been present in his dealings with Gabriel and nobody else, a sign not of their dwindling friendship but the opportunity for something new. Something _different_.

Even in their darkest hours, when Jack could have sworn Gabriel hated him, the other man’s eyes tracked his every move during briefings, as if unable to look away; Jack had returned his attention like a kid with a high-school crush, looking from afar at the unattainable as Gabriel wooed dignitaries at UN social gatherings with a confidence Jack envied and an assertiveness he desired.

It may not have been healthy back then—it may not even be healthy right now—but they both have a vested interest in healing and, in Jack’s case, making up for past mistakes. It’s all he can ask for.

He hits the accelerator, urging his bike to go faster. The sooner he reaches the Watchpoint, the sooner he can work on his plan of attack. Tomorrow, he’ll speak with Ana, rally the team and discuss what needs to happen to bring Reaper back into the fold.

For the first time since he awoke in this strange, post-life existence, Jack feels like he has purpose. Not a rumor of some far-off conspiracy and a rabbit hole to fall down, but actual _purpose_.

A ripple of heat zooms past his left temple, out of place in the turbulent winds and biting cold of the ocean stretch. He lifts a hand to the side of his face, ultra-quick, and his fingers come back wet, blood dripping into the grooves of his thick riding gloves.

Jack frowns, searches around him for any sign of activity. Finds none.

The next shot hits his back tire.

The motorcycle skids out from under him, sending Jack hurtling through the air before he drops like a stone, striking the hard ground below, rolling. His visor reels in protest, proximity alarms wailing as another shot sounds, then another. He avoids the first by throwing himself hard to the left, but the second strikes him in the leg, biting in. Jack groans in pain.

Lethargy creeps up on him like the monster in a child’s storybook, gripping him with sharp claws and a gaping, open maw. His head spins in shades of emergency-red, the words ‘toxicity warning’ splayed across his vision in big, bold letters. He fights to retain consciousness, peering down the length of his body to the wound in his leg, fingers reaching to prise what looks to be a tranquilizer dart from the skin.

 _I need help,_ he realizes suddenly, opening a com-link on his visor, but the world is already slipping away and Jack feels so very, very cold. He reaches, like he once did, not with his hands but with his thoughts, seeking a connection beyond the physical. His bicep burns, the black edges of the mask tattoo a mirror to the darkness that skates across the periphery of his thoughts.

Jack feels him for a moment—only for a moment—before his grip falters and he falls.

*

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> • I don't know if Sombra's EMP would affect the Raptora systems to such an extent in canon, but I'm pulling the author card here and hand-waving it—it's really not the craziest thing I've tried to pull off in this story.  
> • Speaking of crazy... that cliffhanger, am I right?  
>   
> 


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> • It's a surreal feeling to be posting this final chapter, knowing that this story—this labor of love—has truly come to a close. I finished writing back in December, but it never felt complete until now. The outpouring of support for this story has been overwhelming. Thank you all so, so much.  
> • I highly recommend listening to Crywolf's _Windswept_ during or after you read this chapter. It's an incredible song that carries great meaning for this story. You can find it [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cmq5yUa6e6s).  
>   
> 

# vi: receive & transmit

*

 _Could I still love you_  
_Though my arms are breaking?_  
_Could we still be alone?_  
_Do I still know you?_  
_Are you still my answer  
_ _To the question I've asked since I was born?_

*

Jack stirs violently.

Vertigo forces him to his hands and knees on the floor, the world around him lurching in a malaise of grey. He pants heavily into the dull silence of the room, heart beating wildly in his chest as he tries— _fails_ —to regain control of his motor functions.

He’s in an interrogation room, small but empty. Reminiscent of the cells used by Blackwatch back in the day, it has a two-way mirror, a reinforced steel door and no furniture but the plastic chair he startled awake in, now tipped over on its side. The walls are grey.

A quick pat-down of his body reveals he’s been stripped of everything but his shirt, pants and the black anti-flash glasses. His jacket, visor, pulse rifle and what was left of Angela’s med-kit are gone.

Jack’s fingers seek the last thing he remembers feeling before he collapsed—the tranq dart in his leg. There’s a ragged hole where it punctured his fatigues, but the skin beneath is smooth and unbroken. Whether they patched him up while he was under or it’s been long enough for the serum to kick in, Jack doesn’t know. He should probably find out.

He gets to his feet, walks over to the two-way mirror. He raps sharply on the glass. “Anyone alive in there?”

The reply is instantaneous.

“ _Soldier: 76,”_ says a voice over the intercom, thickly-accented and female presenting. _“Or do you prefer Strike Commander Morrison?”_

The two-way mirror yields to reveal the thin, nimble frame of Amélie Lacroix. She’s sat in a desk chair in front of a control panel, her long legs folded elegantly beneath her. Her blue lips are pursed into a hard line, betraying nothing. Her entire body is still, unnaturally so.

“Strike Commander Morrison is dead,” Jack says carefully.

Amélie nods, pleased with his answer.

“Yes,” she says, leveling him with a look. “I suspect he is.”

In the privacy of his own thoughts, Jack's mind kicks into overdrive. Widowmaker’s presence almost certainly means he’s been abducted by Talon, either as a crime of opportunity or in retaliation for their latest fight. There’s a third possibility, one he’s aware of but doesn’t want to think about—that Talon are aware of his connection to Gabriel and are using him as bait.

He wonders what might happen to him if that’s true and Gabriel never comes. Or worse still, he does. The thought makes Jack’s blood run cold.

Amélie straightens in her chair, like a hound catching a scent.

She cues the intercom. “Where is Reaper?” she asks pleasantly, tone as cloying as it is false.

“Go to hell,” Jack snarls. If she thinks he’s going to give up that easily, she has another thing coming.

This isn’t his first interrogation, not by a long shot.

Amélie laughs. The sound is like ice.

“Wrong answer.”

She flicks open a box at the control panel, her movements exaggerated as she toys with the switch. Jack recognizes it instantly as a fear tactic. He stiffens as she flips it, but refuses to bend to such an obvious ploy, keeping his face blank as gas fills the cell, thick and noxious.

He tries to hold his breath against it, but it’s of no use. In minutes, the air in his lungs comes rushing out, imbuing poison in its stead.

He bends over, body tight from the lack of oxygen, coughing and hacking and gasping as the chemical takes hold. It feels like a thousand bull-ants burrowing into his skin, stinging. It  _hurts_.

“I’ll ask you one more time, Soldier,” she says hauntingly. “Where is Reaper?”

Jack grits his teeth, hands fisting his fatigues.

“You can either let me go or kill me,” he bites. “Because I’m not telling you anything.”

He’ll call her bluff or he’ll die trying; either way, Talon will get nothing from him. He forces back the wave of panic that accompanies the thought and breathes deeply, accelerating the effects of the toxin.

Amélie’s eyes flicker from his face to her readings behind the mirror. She sighs delicately…

…and hits a second switch, causing the poison to vent from the room.

Jack grins, showing teeth.

“It’s of no consequence,” Amélie says. She peers down at her nails, pointed and powder-blue. “Someone will come for you. If it isn’t Reaper then it will be Overwatch or the Amari woman.” A cruel smile curls her lips. “Oh, but I do hope it's Ana. Our reunion is long overdue.”

The window darkens, severing Jack's line of sight into the control room, and just like that he's alone again, save his reflection in the glass. The man before him wheezes and gasps as his lungs struggle to take in air as quickly as possible, his silvering hair damp with sweat. His body is lax, spent, limbs hanging loose like a children’s toy, played with and discarded.

Internally, his mind reels. He may have won this round, but Talon still holds all the cards. He’s not blind to the fact that at any moment of her choosing, Widowmaker could return and flick that switch, kill him slowly in his cell, and there wouldn't be a single thing he could do to stop it.

 _She’s right,_ he thinks, dismally. _It_ is _of no consequence to them. If the team don’t come for me, I’m done for. If they do, they’re walking into a trap—or worse, in Reaper’s case…_

Jack closes his eyes at the thought of Gabriel. He tries to reach for him through their bond, issue a word of warning about Talon’s plans, but it’s of no use. He’s too weak; exhausted by the toxin still alive in his system, fatigued by everything else that has happened in the last few hours, and utterly numbed by the realization that even if he did get through to him, he still has no idea where he’s being held.

His only hope is to hold out until someone realizes he’s missing. He promised Angela he’d be right back, and while he hates the thought of another broken promise, it might just be the thing that saves him.

With the last of his strength, Jack pulls himself across the floor and falls into a loose sit in the far corner of the room. From here, he has a clear line of sight to both the door and the two-way mirror. It won't do much if they decide to gas him, but he refuses to be caught off guard again. If he’s to die, he wants to know about it.

Tired, delirious and utterly incapable of sleep, Jack settles in for the long wait.

* 

The record plays a decades-old tune, sad and hopeful. Dust collects in the deep grooves of the vinyl, distorting the sound when the needle runs over it. Static builds, charging.

It jumps and—

* 

 _It felt like he was drowning, senses dulled by the weight of water in his lungs and all around him. Someone was speaking to him but the sound was muffled, indistinct. He struggled to find a handhold in the roiling ocean of his panic—something he could push off of to make his way back to the surface, back to life, back to his team and the people he cared about, back to_ him _…_

He isn’t there, _said the voice of his discontent._ He’s gone, and it’s all your fault.

_The failed op, the rat-tat-tat of machine-gun fire from the Bastion units, the look on his face as he made the call that would simultaneously save and destroy him. However loathe he was to agree with that voice, it was right. This was his fault. All of it, irrevocably. And there was no going back._

_There were hands—on his knees, back, shoulders. Insistent. Tugging. He closed his eyes in an attempt to ignore them, to ignore it all. He’d die alone; he’d drown in the sea of shame he made. The reaper came for them all in the end, and it was going to have its hands full with him._

_He was counting on it._

_Fingers twined around his, squeezed, and there it was, the barest graze of a thumb against his wrist. His throat constricted with the sick realization that he hadn’t thought to cover his mark, that someone else was touching it. Anger bubbled from his throat, unbidden._

_“Don’t. Touch. Me.”_

_He opened his eyes to accompany the words with a stony glare, and froze._

_“Hey,” said Jack Morrison, very much alive. “It’s just me.”_

_His face was tight with pain, golden hair rife with dirt and grime, but his eyes—wide, cornflower-blue—were bright with relief. They grew brighter still as his hand lifted seemingly of its own accord to press flush in the centre of Jack’s chest, the steady thud of his heartbeat drowning out the rat-tat-tat of gunfire that rang in his ears. The rigid determination on Jack’s face when he’d made the call melted away, replaced by the forward curve of his body, bending in to shield them from the prying eyes of their teammates. There was an inherent fondness in his expression, a softness with which he regarded Gabriel, who felt like he could breathe again._

_And to the reaper he thought:_

_Not today._

*

The record skips and with it, time.

*

_“Fuck,” he muttered as the skin on his palms disintegrated into ash-grey smoke. It ate away at the tendons next, biting clean through muscle and bone like it was made out of tissue paper. Maybe it was._

_If he lost focus even for an instant, it was all over. He burnt up, cells degrading at an incredible rate as he slipped from man to shadow, shadow to air, air to… nothing. It stung, too. There was no such thing as painless anymore. It had been so long he’d forgotten what it felt like to breathe without a counterweight on his chest._

_The only relief he found was in siphoning energy from others. The slow, deep draw of power as it ran through his veins was like nothing he had ever experienced, and everything he had been told to avoid. It was an addiction of the worst kind, in that it removed the pain from his body long enough to remind him that what he experienced every day wasn’t life, it was hell. That weight on his chest never lifted no matter how fresh or vibrant the soul, but when the endorphins hit it was easier not to care._

_Sometimes he’d receive flashes. Memories. Of lives he never lived, people he never met. Residue left by the soul’s owner, an imprint that defied time and space. He didn’t pretend to understand what that was all about, choosing instead to brush them away. To forget. The memories were rarely happy, as the people he fed off were rarely happy. They were lowlifes. Scum._

_Like him._

_He looked down at himself, considering. His right arm ended at the wrist, a grotesque stump neither cauterized nor healed over. The seam was located just above his soul-mark, those five damnable letters that had haunted him the moment he received them as a boy, even more so once he knew who they belonged to._

_He gritted his teeth and drew to life a fist as a distraction to the turn of his thoughts—starting with the carpal bones to articulate his forearm, then the extrinsic muscles, carving pathways for connection to the radial, median and ulnar nerves in his brachial plexus. He got all the way to his oblique arches before the construct stuttered and shook, sabotaged from the inside by an image—_

_—of Morrison’s face, pinched and surprised, as he stole a look at his soul-mark moments before everything went to shit, and the man the world thought was better than Gabriel Reyes left him in that god-forsaken place to die, alone._

_He’d stayed dead, up until Ziegler hit him with the Caduceus and brought him back. Part of him stayed that way. The part that hoped; the part that cared. The part that felt anything but pain and anger._

_Or so he’d thought._

_He had felt…_ something _, the day he learned that Jack was still alive. It hadn’t resonated with any of his default emotions, too deep for pain and too sharp for anger, and it took him all of a month to realize that it was fear._

_It was laughable, the idea that he was afraid of anyone, and Jack-fucking-Morrison of all people. But before Jack, he hadn’t truly understood the extent of one’s capacity to hurt others, especially those they considered their friends. He wasn’t in the business of deluding himself—he wasn’t Jack, after all—and he’d long since pieced together what his soul-mark was for. Who it was for._

_Once, the thought left him contemplative, just shy of hopeful._

_Now, it terrified him._

_The only way he could fathom the thought was to break it down. When the time came for them to meet again—and they would, of that he had no doubt—it would be on his terms. There would be no weakness, no room for fear. He would strike hard and fast, put a bullet in Morrison’s brain the way he ought to have done in Zurich, then one in his own as soon as he wiped the floor with Talon._

_His right hand rippled as he clenched his fingers into that hard, unyielding fist. He traced the letters of his misbegotten soul-mark with his left, felt the newly-formed skin react to the touch._

_One day, he'd end it all._ _The way it should have been._

*

The needle hits a locked groove on the record. The world around him twists. Time stutters.

The ubiquitous connection expands, then contracts.

*

The door buckles and Jack looks up from his stupor. Alarms blare to life in the distance, a delayed response to the heavy gunfire echoing down the hall. But that isn't what caught his attention: A masked figure stands in the threshold of the now-broken door. He’s clad entirely in black, the barrels of his dual-wielded shotguns smoking.

Reaper enters the room like he owns it, stalking across its length in three easy steps to extend a hand to Jack, who takes it without hesitation. On his feet, he regards the other man with a level glance, the twin slits of the barn-owl mask betraying nothing.

“Quickly,” Gabriel says, moving back toward the door. He pushes up against the wall, using the vantage point to peer out the room and down the hall. He darts out into it, motioning for Jack to follow. “Area’s clear. Let’s move out.”

The intermittent strobe of emergency lighting bathes the hall outside in a glimmering red, a macabre accompaniment to the blood on the still-warm bodies of the Talon agents who had guarded his cell. Jack falls in line beside Gabriel, mirroring his movements, keeping an eye on his six. It’s ridiculous how eager he is for this—he’s still in his fatigues, unarmed and altogether unprepared for an assault on Talon, but he’s on the move, actually doing something for a change, and that distinction makes all the difference.

They reach a flight of entry-way stairs when Gabriel raises a fist, signalling them to a stop. He angles his body to the side so Jack can see past him into the room beyond. Four men guard the staircase. Talon. Fully armed.

“What happens now?” he whispers.

“Now,” Gabriel says lowly, pressing the body of a Hellfire shotgun into Jack’s chest. “We fight.”

Jack’s finger curls around the gun’s trigger, his other hand raising to grip it beneath the barrel. He nods curtly to Gabriel, encouraging him to take the lead. There's a sense of ease in fighting at Gabriel's side again. It's uncanny, the realization that he knows what he's about to do before he does it. He's reminded acutely of Gabriel's words to him in Giza: “ _I know you’re every move before you even think it.”_ Derision aside, he was right. They move in each other’s space like they belong there.

Always have. Always will.

So it doesn't surprise Jack when Gabriel leaps out of cover, conjuring a third shotgun from beneath his leather coat and firing both simultaneously. The gun in Jack’s hand remains solid so he follows suit, reflecting Gabriel’s movements. He aims the gun at an agent looking to take them off-guard and pulls the trigger. When it fires, the recoil knocks Jack’s arm back into Gabriel, who shifts out of the way intuitively.

The high-impact shot connects, cutting the man to ribbons in a garish spray of blood.

“Holy shit,” Jack breathes, looking at the gun with newfound respect.

Gabriel chuckles darkly, turning on his heel to aim a shot over Jack’s shoulder. There’s the loud _crack_ of the gun discharging, followed by the tell-tale snap _-thwack_ of impact. Jack turns to see the last of the guards slumped against the banister, bleeding heavily from a wound in his side.

Gabriel walks, strong and authoritative, toward the prone man. He kicks the assault rifle to the side, levels the barrel of his shotgun at the man’s temple and growls, “Widowmaker. Where is she?”

The man’s face is tight with pain. “S-south-east quadrant,” he grits out. “She’s leading a secondary team.”

“Reaper,” Jack warns, eyes flickering down the hallway, where the sound of boots on the ground draws closer. “We’re about to have company.”

Gabriel sweeps his arm inwards, striking the man across the face with the butt of the shotgun, knocking him out cold.

Jack straightens, surprised by his lenience.

“Wasn’t armed,” Gabriel murmurs by way of explanation, motioning to the man’s assault rifle several feet away. He kneels by the man’s body and removes his earpiece, handing it to Jack. “Here. In case we get separated.”

Jack slips it on and keys the frequency to their old channel, aware of Gabriel doing the same. He kneels down and scoops up the assault rifle, moving to return the borrowed shotgun only to watch it turn to smoke in his hand. The inky black tendrils coil around Gabriel's right sleeve, suffusing to the leather. _Becoming_ it.

Jack’s mouth opens slightly.

“This way.”

They sprint down the hall, away from the encroaching footsteps, checking each room for enemy soldiers as Gabriel leads them further into the labyrinthine tunnels of the Talon base.

After five minutes of running unobstructed, their luck runs out as they reach a choke-hold—a squadron of at least twenty men barring passage to the next quadrant. Jack loses himself to the fight that follows: the sound of gunfire all around him, the thrum of adrenaline coursing through his veins as his lands a shot on one, then two, then _four_.

One of the men loses his gun and attempts to grapple him instead, locking them in close combat. He’s enhanced, definitely above average strength, but Jack is better. He staggers him with a flurry of blows and peers over his shoulder just in time to see Gabriel spring into action, his entire body giving way to a swarm of shadow, black and opaque, as he enters the very middle of the fray.

Jack’s earpiece crackles. _“Clearing the area.”_

Black smoke spills across the floor. Jack sees it, turns to his opponent and says, “Sorry about this” and in one super-fast movement, he pivots them both, drawing the man’s back into the line of fire as Gabriel attacks, emptying both shotguns at breakneck speed into the collective force.

The Talon agent in Jack’s grasp screams as he’s hailed by bullets, the spread cutting his back to pieces. He thrashes violently in his grip, forcing Jack to engage every muscle just to keep him there, a human shield against the barrage of gunfire. The man falls limp a moment later, dead.

Ears ringing, Jack drops the body. His heart thunders in his chest, rabbit-fast, an involuntary reaction to the heat of battle.

Gabriel crosses the distance between them, exuding menace with every measured step. He treads carefully over the bodies of the fallen soldiers, coming to a stop directly in front of him.

Jack shifts his grip on the gun in his hands and asks, “Any idea where they stashed my gear?”

He nods. “I’ll show you.”

They cross into the next quadrant, a short rap of fire from Jack’s rifle silencing the resistance they encounter along the way. The sweat that clings to him cools in the base’s filtered air. It’s colder here, darker, halls lit wanly by running lights, casting a faint glow against the dull grey of roughshod, metal walls. Before him, Gabriel continues forward, dark coat billowing around him like a second shadow.

Then he stills, fast enough that Jack nearly barrels into the back of him.

“In here,” he says.

The storage room is small, dark and nondescript. Jack finds his motorcycle jacket in a locker and runs his hands reverently over the leather, fingers grazing the worn curve of the six on the back. He slips it on and the mere weight of it bolsters him. The visor and face-plate go on next, Jack pocketing the black anti-flash glasses as the visor's heads-up display bathes the world in red.

The only thing missing from the locker is his pulse rifle, but he finds it in a nearby crate, along with the emitters. He hoists it up onto his shoulder, turns on his heel and exits the room—

Where his good mood falters at the sight of Gabriel, leaning heavily against the wall, upper body heaving as he struggles to keep himself upright. Jack’s by his side in an instant, pulling them out of the exposed hallway and back into the storage room. He hits the door lock on his way in and helps him onto the bench.

“What is it?” he asks, but it's a superfluous question—the biometrics display on the tactical visor tells him everything he needs to know. Talon must have clipped him with another bullet. There’s no trace of the round in Gabriel’s body, but the wound it left behind is clear.

“It’s—stronger in wraith form,” Gabriel tells him, voice stilted. “Too weak to kill me, but more than enough to incapacitate me. I didn’t want to tell you this earlier, but Widowmaker’s gas—it plays with the limbic system, makes the subject… _susceptible_ to coercion.”

Jack frowns at that. “I feel fine.”

“You might,” he says, “but _I_ don’t.”

“Oh,” Jack breathes, as the realization dawns on him. “ _Oh.”_

“There’s no way Widowmaker could have planned this,” Gabriel murmurs, “not without knowing about the bond.” His masked face snaps up to look at Jack, the motion stiff and unnatural. Pained. “She must have thought she’d let you stew in it, then go back and try again.”

“Only you broke me out before she could,” Jack says.

“Exactly,” Gabriel replies.

He leans forward, one hand tightening around the lip of the bench, the other reaching up to pull off his mask. The face beneath looks wan, tired. Smoke rushes from parted lips, black with a coil of red at the center. He sucks in another breath, sharp in the relative silence of the room.

Jack tries not to hover, intent on giving him space, but it doesn’t feel right to stray too far. He settles for crouching beside him, remaining silent, waiting for _him_ to make the first move.

Gabriel huffs, tracing the edge of Jack’s face-plate with a pointed finger. “I take off my mask, you put yours on. Never on equal footing, are we?”

“Tell me what you need,” Jack urges.

He shakes his head.

“It isn’t that simple,” he counters. “I learned that the first time. There’s no easy fix except time, which is in short supply right now. Any fight we enter into out there is going to end badly.”

Jack frowns, stuck on three words.  _The first time._

“You know, I felt that,” he points out. “Thought I’d been shot myself. Wasn’t until I woke up the next morning that I realized I hadn’t. I thought I was going crazy, seeing and feeling things that weren’t there. But I wasn’t, was I? It was you. You brought me back, however unknowingly.”

He looks at Gabriel, who looks at him, eyebrows furrowing.

“My point is, the bond carried that over to me—the pain, the sensation, _everything_ —and then you took it back, further even then I’ve ever gone with you. You took _control_. Who’s to say we can’t try that again?”

“I remember,” Gabriel says suddenly, peering at Jack with wonder. “It was cold where you were. I didn’t even think about it, I just moved. I don’t even own a motorcycle.” He looks away and laughs. “This is giving me a headache just thinking about it. Do you really want to try again?”

“I can handle it,” Jack tells him.

The cautious look on Gabriel’s face buckles, replaced by something warmer.

“Alright.”

With a nod, Jack closes his eyes and turns his gaze inward, searching for that far-off place inside where the soul-bond exists between them as pinpoints of light in the darkness, like stars distant and dying. He reaches out, grasping at the threads of that ethereal light; its resonance is tangible now, a bright hum in the periphery of his thoughts, echoing in his eyes and ears, blanketing his senses.

 _A little further,_ he thinks, pulling on the thread that knits them together, unspooling it slowly then all at once, to bring the full force of their connection down upon him, barreling into his open, empty chest—

—and there at the end of that thread is Gabriel, the needle that spins Jack’s battered, broken record, sounding the music that gives his life meaning, and the source of that near-perfect light. They collide like neighboring galaxies, propelled together by gravity, stripping apart at their base components to become something different, something _new._

He enters the world on an exhale, two sets of lungs compressing as the air leaves them empty and wanting. In, and the quickstep beat of his hearts begin to harmonize into a single, staccato note. He opens his eyes, blinded momentarily by the double-exposed image of the unlit storeroom and the rigid bearing of both his bodies as they stare at each other. He blinks it away in favor of the biometrics display in two of his eyes, parsing the root cause of the problem that resulted in his birth. It’s there in his sights—the sickly, ragged hole in one of his bodies, and the poison still circulating in the other.

Here, he can see it for what it truly is: a corruption pulling at the deepest parts of him, chipping away at the strength of his wraith half, who has taken the brunt of both infections in an attempt to liberate his soldier. This cannot be allowed to continue, he thinks to himselves. There can be no time for caution, no room for weakness. The way forward is clear.

He loops the crystalline threads of his awareness around the anomaly, ribbons of light like comet-tails scorching the poison’s influence from his veins. The susceptibility of one mind is compensated by the laser-like focus of the other, the accelerated healing of both halves merging together to draw out the toxin, close the wound. But it’s not enough, he knows that now, awareness ever-expanding. His time has run out.

He is discovered.

He pushes his bodies to move in unison, up, out of the storeroom and into the hall. The men outside are fast to raise their weapons, but with four arms and twice the brainpower, he’s incandescent.

When he’s finished, he’s the only two left standing. The room smells of pulse munitions and death.

It’s a fitting wake for the freedom he’s had but a taste of, and it’s on that note he closes, disappearing back into the ether he was born from, having served his purpose, never made to last.

*

Jack returns to the feeling of Gabriel’s sharp gasp, as distinct as if it were his own. They’re in the hallway, bent low—no longer one entity, but still connected. He closes his eyes, feels the ebb and flow of Gabriel’s thoughts in his head, hopelessly tangled in his own.

“Mierda,” Jack breathes, only they aren’t his words at all, and when Gabriel rests a hand on his shoulder to steady himself, Jack feels a phantom twitch in his own fingers. He closes them into a fist, willing his body alone to respond. The hand on his shoulder remains still; a small victory.

Jack looks up, brushing away the vestiges of double-vision, and asks, “How do you feel?”

“Disorientated,” says Gabriel slowly, as if testing the words on his tongue, “but better.”

“Show me.”

Gabriel’s fingers dip beneath his shirt, pulling it up to reveal the dark skin of his abdomen, right where the wound had been. The hole left by the bullet is gone; not healed, but like it was never there in the first place. Unbidden, Jack places his palm flat against his stomach, feeling the play of muscles beneath the skin.

“You can still feel it, can’t you?” Jack asks, loathe to let go of him but drawing back all the same.

Gabriel taps his temple. “Up here? Yeah.”

“Same,” he says.

Jack gets to his feet, brushes himself off and offers an arm to Gabriel. He takes it.

A trickle of darkness leeches through the storeroom door to Gabriel’s waiting hand, forming a familiar white object. He slips on the mask, pulls up the hood of his cloak and, with a brief nod to Jack, starts down the hall. Jack follows hot on his heels, scanning their surroundings.

“Where are we going?” he asks.

Gabriel replies cryptically, “To end this.”

They pass through the entrance to the south-east quadrant, moving fast and low. It’s eerily quiet in the entry-way corridor, though the lights here are brighter, showing up the cracks in the aged grey walls. The end of the hall opens up into an atrium, beyond which are several flights of stairs. Gabriel makes a beeline toward them, indicating Jack to follow.

The atmosphere shifts the moment they enter the room, air growing colder by degrees. Jack searches the space for any sign of danger, finds none, but still can’t shake the feeling they’re being watched.

A tall, thin figure slips from behind the concrete support column in front of them. It’s Widowmaker, her assault rifle cocked on her hip, delicate features twisted in hatred. Jack notes the lack of heat signature on his visor with some concern and levels his gun at her, ready and willing to fire.

Beside him, Gabriel stiffens, but not from shock.

“What did they tell you?” he asks her, carefully.

Amélie peers out at him from thick, dark lashes. “That you’re a traitor,” she says, venom lacing her words. Her eyes never leave Gabriel, not even to blink. “I didn’t believe them at first, but now I see.” She snorts in derision. “You’ve gone soft, Reaper.”

Gabriel stalks forward, his body tense with anger. Jack feels it crackle through the bond like static, cold and electric. Amélie’s eyes track the movement, but she makes no move to respond to the silent threat.

“Talon betrayed me first,” he growls. “They planned to put a hit out on me after Osiris, or did they neglect to mention that?” He adds bitterly, “Just ask Sombra. I’m sure she knows all about it.”

Amélie’s eyes widen imperceptibly. “Sombra went off-grid. I thought she was with you.”

“Well she isn’t,” Gabriel sneers, hiding his surprise with vitriol. Jack feels it—but then, Jack feels everything from him, his desolation strongest of all. There used to be trust there. In Talon. In her. “Now, are we going to fight or what?”

The surprise on Amélie’s face is swallowed by something indecipherable. She straightens to her full height, balancing perfectly on twin stilettos.

“Answer me this first,” she says, and nods to Jack. “Why him? If you are who I think you are, then he's responsible—”

It happens so quickly, Jack almost misses it. If not for his anchor in the other man's mind, he would have.

Gabriel dissolves into wraith form as easy as blinking, seeping into Widowmaker's space like ink through water. He reforms and pins her to the concrete with his forearm, her wide eyes level with his wrist, which, Jack notes, is oddly bare; the gauntlet that covers it is gone.

Amélie notices this too, for her gaze shifts from Gabriel’s mask to his wrist then, bizarrely, to Jack. It clicks for them both in that exact moment:

_He just showed her his soul-mark._

Gabriel studies her closely. He must see something in her face—something Jack can’t quite parse—for he steps back, moving once again as shadow to Jack’s side. Then, and only then, does he speak:

“Do you understand why I came for him?”

Breathless, Amélie nods.

“He saved your life,” she says.

“He did,” Gabriel agrees. “But who’s going to save yours, Widow?”

As he speaks, he pulls on the connection between them, launching Jack deeper into his thoughts. It’s an odd sensation, like swimming in an alien sea, incapable of knowing just how far down it goes. He feels Gabriel keenly, seeing the world through his eyes as Amélie stares at him.

There’s an instant of silent understanding between the three of them as Gabriel implores her to see what he’s seeing now—that without him, without Sombra, she has very few allies here. One misstep, and Talon won’t hesitate to take her down either.

 _Get out,_ he begs her silently. _As soon as you can._

Amélie’s lips quirk. “I’m going to regret this, chéri, but you leave me no choice.”

Then she takes a swing at him, fast and hard, and Jack’s hands move to defend himself, only it isn’t _him_ being attacked at all—it’s Gabriel. _What the fuck,_ Jack thinks, as the blow connects with his gauntlet.

Gabriel echoes the sentiment in their shared thoughts, parrying her second hit and pulling her into a grapple in order to halt the fight. Only Widowmaker isn’t yielding. In fact, she’s pushing further into him, using his momentum to propel herself forward. Her lips pass by the side of his head, dangerously close to his ear, and she whispers: _“Knock me out on my signal.”_

Stunned but pleased, Gabriel gives the barest of nods against her. Jack doesn’t know what to think; he stays well out of it, on the fringes of both the room and Gabriel’s thoughts. He knows better than to get involved.

The fight continues. Amélie gives the attack her all, relentless, throwing Gabriel on the defensive. The two clash like nothing Jack has ever seen before. Each possess an unusual, almost inhuman grace—Gabriel in his strength, Widowmaker in her agility. They fight like it’s a dance, two experts locked blow by blow.

Then, Jack sees it—an opening. 

The signal.

Gabriel sees it too and he punches her— _hard._ It throws her, long enough to pull her into a choke-hold. Amélie’s nails bite into the leather of his coat as she struggles, kicking her feet out from under her, but his grip is too strong. He maintains his hold until she succumbs to it, crumbling in his arms like a marionette with its strings cut, upon which he lets her go.

Jack feels the stir of conflict deep in Gabriel’s gut at the thought of leaving her alone, but it has to be done. She knew it, so too do they.

Gabriel straightens, the silence punctuated by the sound of his labored breathing. He turns, and Jack dips the barrel of his pulse rifle down to the ground as he approaches him.

“Are you okay?” Gabriel asks.

He doesn’t have to ask—he's is in Jack’s mind as much as Jack is in his—but he does and that, to Jack, makes all the difference. He nods, and Gabriel squeezes his arm in lieu of a smile.

“Let’s get out of here,” he says.

Together, they climb the stairwell to the upper levels of the base, gunning it hard for the exit. They clear the final flight, making it to what Jack assumes is the ground floor—it’s the first time he’s seen natural light bleed through the threshold of the door. He pushes through into the space beyond, sprinting out into the open, following Gabriel’s retreating form a few paces ahead.

As their surroundings come into view, however, Jack balks. His feet stutter beneath him, slowing to a stop as he peers to the left and right. The building that stretches out before him is abandoned, near dilapidated. Wind whistles in from where the glass windows once stood, suspended on the cliff-side, overlooking the ocean. Jack takes an aborted step toward it, bereft.

Looming in the distance, perched on its own stretch, is Watchpoint: Gibraltar.

Which makes this—

“No,” he breathes, and the word catches in his throat. “This can’t be right.”

“Jack?”

He turns to Gabriel, stopped several feet in front of him, eyeing Jack with a concern he feels acutely through their open bond.

“What is it?” Gabriel asks, hesitantly.

“This place…” Jack begins, looking at him in askance. “I’ve been here before. It was Blackwatch.”

“It was _Talon_ ,” corrects Gabriel.

And Jack—Jack should have seen this coming. Except he had, hadn’t he? One of his very first thoughts upon waking was that the room bore resemblance to a Blackwatch cell. The fact that it _is_ one shouldn’t be that far a stretch, but something about it bothers Jack.

He rubs at his temples, agitated. “God _damn it_ ,” he growls. “How far up did this go?”

He’s altogether unsurprised when Gabriel says, “To the top.”

Jack’s pulse quickens, body tightening in anticipation. They don’t have time for this—they need to get out of here, _now_ —but his feet are rooted to the floor, and he’s watching Gabriel with ill-concealed dread. There are no enemies in his sights—no sign of a threat anywhere, in fact, which he supposes is a sign in and of itself—yet he can’t shake this sick feeling, burrowing to the core of him, that tells him to take Gabriel and _run._

Gabriel takes a step toward Jack and says— _something._ His voice is swallowed by the noise in Jack’s ears, loud and blaring, as his visor picks up movement on the perimeter, there and then gone.

A red laser sight cuts the air between them; a gunshot rings out.

The bullet is fast, but Jack’s faster.

In the nanoseconds it takes for the mind to operate, Jack leaps forward, covering Gabriel’s body with his own and sending them both sprawling to the ground below. His head spins, visor mapping the bullet’s trajectory while all he can see is the remembered image of that deep-seated illness worming its way through Gabriel’s body, lingering like a specter behind his eyelids.

 _That was too close,_ he thinks, breathing hard in the resulting silence. He runs a cursory glance over Gabriel, scanning for injury. Finds nothing.

_Good._

“Do you have eyes on the shooter?” Gabriel asks, voice pitched low and soft.

Jack checks his visor, blinking away spots of darkness.

“Heat signatures at three and five o’clock,” he says, “and closing. We’re sitting ducks here, unless you can get us out?”

Gabriel nods. “I can’t go far if I’m taking you with me, but it should be enough to clear their perimeter.”

He moves to sit up. Jack grabs his arm, the muscles in his hand flexing almost painfully under the skin. He feels too big for himself all of a sudden, like he’ll break right through.

 _“Be careful,_ ” Jack stresses. “You’re not invincible, not against those rounds.”

“I could say the same to you,” Gabriel replies.

His concern is a dull trickle through the bond, which itself seems to loosen. Jack clings fast to the fire-bright vestiges of it—only the deeper he goes, the darker it gets.

“I think it’s too late for that,” he hears himself say.

Gabriel asks, “Jack?” and it’s so strange to hear his worry but not be able to _feel_ it, just like—and this is almost funny—he can’t feel his legs. Or his arms. Or his chest.

“I think—” The words fall away before they reach his lips, so he tries again. “I think I’ve been shot.”

He lists back and the ground rushes to meet him, stopped only by Gabriel’s arms shooting out to grab his shoulders. Jack’s vision swims, the toxicity warning on his visor going haywire, and how had he not noticed that before? Only it doesn’t matter. None of it does.

“Gabe,” Jack breathes. “I’m sorry.”

The panic is clear in Gabriel’s voice now. “ _Jack._ ”

“Listen to me!” Jack growls desperately, pulling him close. His thoughts are in total disarray, leaping from one extreme to the other; it’s a struggle to slow them down, to get the words out, but he has to. “You did the one thing I never did, Gabriel. You _came back_. I can’t tell you what that means to me, but I know what it means to you. Everything we did to—to each other, to ourselves. I’m sorry I never got to make it up to you.” He cracks a smile, hidden behind the face-plate. “I hope this helps.”

“ _It doesn’t_ ,” Gabriel argues, voice thick. “Don’t do this to me, Jack. _Please._ ”

“I’m sorry,” Jack says.

He breathes, and the sound that follows is broken, rasping. His fingers skirt the side of Gabriel’s mask, thumb dipping into the hollow there. It’s fitting, Jack thinks, that this is the last thing he sees—the skeletal lines of his soul-mark made real.

“I’m sorry,” he says again, and the weight on his chest is brutal now, pulling him down, down, _down…_

Jack Morrison closes his eyes, and knows no more.

*

The ruins are cold and desolate, so far removed from the blazing inferno it was the last time he was here. He ducks the makeshift fence, finds his footing in the debris as he treads his way carefully inside, the skeleton of their home all around him.

It doesn’t take long to find what he’s looking for. The concrete slab remains half-buried in the floor from where he pushed it away, its edges a rusty brown from his blood-soaked hands. The rest of the stain is gone, stolen by rain and time, having moved on where he cannot.

Death still hangs heavy over Watchpoint: Zurich, the past haunting its every breath as wind whistles through its broken, empty frame. He feels similarly haunted, by ghosts and demons both—the ghosts of those that died in his care that day and the demons of his own making.

“Why here?” a voice asks. It’s heavily accented and vaguely familiar. He looks up and sees, of all people, the old woman that took him from the wreckage that night. Her worn face watches him with concern.

Another voice asks, “Why this place?” and at the woman’s side is her husband, his weathered fingers finding hers in a firm but gentle grip. He watches him too, grief lining the downward turn of his mouth.

“Of all places,” says a third voice, and he doesn’t need to look to know who it belongs to—he knows off sound alone—but he does anyway. The expression on Einarsson’s face is soft, achingly so, as he reaches out to touch Jack, his hand a counterweight to the one pulling at his heart.

“Why do you keep doing this to yourself?”

“I have to,” he explains, closing a hand around the other man’s wrist. “He’s still here. I have to find him. He’s _still here._ ”

“All this guilt, Jack, you have to let it go. It’s drowning you,” Einarsson says, staring at him imploringly.

“Then I deserve to drown.”

Pain warps the doctor’s face. “Nobody deserves that,” he says, gently. “Not even you.”

Jack looks away, unable to stomach yet another hurt inflicted on someone he cares about. When he speaks, it’s to the ash-stained ground.

“Truth is, I couldn’t let go even if I wanted to. Making this right is all that’s kept me going these past few months. I—don’t know who I am without it anymore. How pathetic is that?” He laughs darkly and shakes his head. “I don’t expect you to understand. You still see me as a hero—and I’m grateful for that, truly, I am—but what I did… was wrong.”

“You didn’t know,” Einarsson says.

Jack’s hands curl into fists. “Oh, but I did,” he bites out. “Perhaps not consciously, but deep down? I knew. And I was terrified. Of what had happened, of what it meant. So I ran. But I can’t run anymore, Markus. I have to stay and fix this. I have to _find him_.”

“That’s what I’m trying to tell you, Jack—” he urges, only it isn’t him speaking at all. Jack looks up sharply, body tensing like a bowstring pulled taut because Einarsson is _gone_ , the old couple are gone. In their place is a low, roiling fog suffusing the wreckage, swallowing it in misty grey.

The sight is made all the eerier when a man steps out of the haze, watching him with sorrowful, brown eyes.

“—he’s _found_ ,” Gabriel finishes.

Jack looks at him; not the man he knows today, but a perfect facsimile of the one he left behind. Gabriel-that-was.

“I don’t believe you,” Jack says. His body starts to shake. “I’m sorry, but I don’t.”

This place. This moment. This _Gabriel._

It’s all too much.

“Jack,” says Gabriel, and he’s right there in front of him, bracketing the sides of his face with hands that are warm and alive, his eyes wide and human _._ He looks like he always did, before the war and during, where Jack could rest easy knowing he had Gabriel’s back, and Gabriel had his.

_And then you killed him._

“I killed you,” Jack says, his stomach bottoming out. “Oh god, I can’t—I can’t do this, Gabe, I _can’t_ —”

“Yes, you can,” Gabriel replies soothingly, thumbs rubbing circles into the hollows of his cheeks. “Come on, Jackie, breathe with me.”

Jack lets out a surprised laugh through his tears. “You haven’t called me that since SEP.”

He smiles. “I know.”

What little cheer the thought brings him dies in the wake of the destruction around them, the smoke still saturating his lungs from that night. He can’t escape it; it’s everywhere he goes, in every breath of clean air he takes—it’s in _him_ , and it’ll never go away.

“I’m so tired,” Jack confides, voice trembling, “of carrying this with me.”

He lurches forward and Gabriel’s there in an instant, arms closing around him, drawing Jack in. When he speaks, Jack feels the rumble of the words in his upper body, dark like storms. “I know, Jack.”

Jack continues, listless. “Part of me never left. Part of me is buried here, in the rubble, still dying.”

“It doesn’t have to be this way,” Gabriel says. “You can leave it behind.”

He shakes his head.

“You don’t understand,” Jack says mournfully. The weight in his chest tightens to the point of pain. “You weren’t given a choice. In any of this. The grave took you kicking and screaming. But I—I _had_ a choice and I chose this. If that part of me leaves, or if I leave it, then I’ve failed.  _Again_.”

He pulls back, holding Gabriel at arm’s length.

“I’m sorry,” he says, touching his fingers to the healed scar above the other man’s lip, “I can’t leave him.”

Gabriel’s eyebrows furrow. “I’m right here. You know that, right?”

Jack nods.

“Then you’re right; I _don’t_ understand,” Gabriel says flatly. “There’s nothing here, only ruins. You have nothing to gain in here, and everything to lose out there.” He points outside the Watchpoint perimeter.

Jack’s eyes follow in that direction, staring into the distance as the sun ebbs closer to the horizon.

“I can’t leave him,” he says again, lost.

“But that’s exactly what you’re doing,” he argues, frustration bleeding into his tone. His hands hold fast to Jack, not too tight, but just enough to remind him of his presence. “You’re going the one place I can’t follow. In staying here, you’re leaving me alone. Is that what you want?”

“You know it isn’t,” Jack says hollowly, then sighs. “I did everything I could. Why can’t that be enough?”

Gabriel ducks his head, catching his eye. “I only need you to do one more thing for me, Jack. One more thing and this will all be over.”

“What’s that?”

“Wake up,” he says, as if it’s the simplest thing in the world.

“I don’t want this,” Jack begs, eyes prickling with tears. “ _Please_. Just let me go.”

“If I didn’t let you go the first time, why would I let you go now?” Gabriel protests.

He doesn’t know how much more of this he can take. He warned Gabriel that it was too much, too fast, but he keeps pushing and Jack—Jack can’t _do this_. He throws himself bodily at Gabriel, channeling the full force of his strength into the blow. It’s ugly, the ugliest thing he’s ever done, and it reeks of desperation, but he doesn’t care.

How can he? He has nothing. He _is_ nothing. The sooner Gabriel realizes that, the sooner he’ll leave Jack alone, and the easiest way to get him to do that is to make him angry.

So Jack claws at him, punches and kicks, but no matter how hard he tries, nothing he does leaves a mark. He’s left, panting and sore, while Gabriel remains unmoved, watching him with doleful eyes.

 _This isn't over,_ Jack's mind roars, and lunges at him again. Only this time, Gabriel is all out of patience.

He pivots, using Jack’s own momentum to tackle him to the ground. They land with a hard _whump!_ in the dirt, right beside the concrete slab that once buried him. Gabriel locks him into a hold, using little to no energy to keep him there. Jack struggles against it, nails biting into skin, but it’s of no use. He’s stuck in the cage of Gabriel’s arms, glaring at the man above him as they both pant sharply in the silence.

Gabriel looks at him pointedly. “You done?”

Jack hits his head back hard against the floor, feeling the pain bloom behind his eyelids, followed swiftly by exhaustion. The fight drains out of him, burnt away, leaving only cinders in its wake. Frustrated tears pool in the corners of his eyes.

“Why won’t you leave me alone?”

The feeling of Gabriel’s fingers against his forehead, brushing the hair away from his face, is so tender a gesture after their fight that something inside of Jack breaks. He sobs brokenly into the curve of Gabriel’s wrist, tears stinging his cheeks as they fall. His body shudders, raw and searing, like an exposed nerve. And through it all, Gabriel cards his hand through Jack’s hair in light, lingering touches, his face soft and open.

Jack cries, “Why can’t I just die?”

Gabriel’s fingers stutter on his skin. He breathes in sharply, painfully, eyes bright with tears of his own. “Because it’s you. It’s always been you, from the very beginning. I don’t know how to make you see that.” There’s a sadness to his words, so subtle Jack would have missed it, were he not close enough to glimpse it on his face. “You’re not the only one who feels trapped here, but I can’t wait forever.”

Jack exhales and it’s a ragged, wounded thing that slips past the vice-grip on his lungs and loosens in his chest. He shifts forward, filling the hollow spaces between them, seeking comfort in Gabriel's arms.

“I know,” he utters, swallowing past the lump in his throat. “I’m sorry. For everything, I—”

Gabriel hushes him. “I’m not here for an apology. You saved my life, Jack; I’m here to thank you and return the favor.” He smiles, lips pressed against Jack’s shoulder. “So come with me.”

Jack looks to the ruins, a pale reflection of the place they once knew, warped and disfigured. He wonders what it would be like to leave it all behind—for good this time—and realizes he already knows the answer. It’s the timbre of Gabriel's voice, the quickstep beat of his heart in Jack’s ears, the warmth of his skin where everything is cold and hollow.

And when Gabriel extends a hand, smiling at him tiredly, it’s no contest.

He smiles back and takes it.

* 

Jack wakes to an absence of pain, the beginnings of a name on his lips.

In the haze of sound and sight, he registers his surroundings. He’s in a hospital bed, hooked up to no machinery at all bar a portable holo-screen overhead, tracking his vitals. There’s a privacy curtain drawn and thick, white bandages around his upper body. He prods at them, feeling nothing but light and light and _light_ —a sensation he recognizes as Angela’s Caduceus energy saturating the room.

There’s no hint of that sterile, sickbay smell. Rather, the scent of cotton and sea-wind. Jack breathes it in, suffused by warmth, blissfully numb to the pain he knows he’ll feel tomorrow.

When he next looks up, the curtains have parted and Angela’s hand is on his shoulder. Wordlessly, she hands him his glasses, which he slips on immediately, the world around him snapping into focus.

“How are you feeling?” she asks with a tired smile.

“Good,” he says, clearing his throat. “Better.”

Angela nods and skirts closer to the bed, running a scanner up and down his torso in a slow, controlled movement.

“It’s been twelve hours since we performed emergency surgery to remove the bullet,” she explains. “Between our resources and your enhanced healing, the pain you’re feeling should be minimal.”

“Non-existent, more like.”

“Expect that to change once the Caduceus has run its course,” Angela tells him, leveling him with a glance. Her lips twitch. “There are a lot of people who want a word with you, Jack. I’ve known your secret for three days and already it’s proving difficult to discourage their questions.”

Jack flinches. “I’m sorry.”

Angela shoots him a searching look, but it lasts all of a second before it collapses. She shakes her head. “I can’t pretend to know why you did it—why you felt the need to hide it from me, and why you’re still hiding from others—but no harm will come to you here. Not on my watch.”

Jack softens. “Thanks, Angela.”

She leans in and hugs him gently, mindful of the bandages.

“I’m just glad you’re awake. We all are. You can’t imagine our shock when Reaper appeared with you in his arms, both covered in your blood.” She trembles slightly. Jack’s hand finds the center of her back, pressing softly, and the tension in her shoulders disintegrates.

“No,” Jack says gently, “I can't.”

“I wasn’t about to let you slip away from us again, not so soon after you’d told me.” She leans back to watch him, blue eyes iridescent in the soft light of the room. “Fortunately, I wasn’t alone. Everyone rallied together to bring you here; I never seen anything like it before in my life.”

Jack nods, taking it all in. “What about Reaper? Is he here?”

“Gabriel was, yes,” Angela says, an emphasis on the change of name. “Things are—not great between us. I confess, I never expected to see him again outside the battlefield.” She looks at him expectantly.

“It’s…” Jack searches for the word. “Complicated.”

She inclines her head. “Yes, I suspect it is.”

Jack sighs. “Suppose I’ll have to face the music sometime,” he says, and moves to sit up.

Angela scowls at him.

“Not yet you won’t. You’re on bed rest for the next few days _at least._ I’m not letting you out of my sight.”

“Angela—”

“ _Jack_ ,” she says, steel in her voice. “Don’t make me pull rank on you.”

Jack raises his hands in a placating gesture, lips twitching into a wry smile. “Okay, fine,” he concedes, and settles back against the pillows. “Can I at least have some visitors? It’s going to get very old very fast otherwise.”

Angela smiles back. “I know just the one. Wait here.”

It's Ana. Jack's smile widens as she enters the room, closing the door behind her. She stills at his bedside, looks at him for a long moment, then leans in and hugs him as tightly as his condition will allow. He relaxes into it, arms lifting to hold her in turn.

“I should wipe that smirk right off your face, Jack Morrison,” she says immediately after, perching herself on the edge of his bed. “What the hell were you thinking, getting kidnapped by Talon? Markus was worried sick!”

“I didn’t do it on purpose,” Jack says indignantly, only for the rest of her statement to sink in. He balks. “Wait, you _told Einarsson?_ Ana!”

“Hardly,” she sniffs, but folds at Jack’s half-crazed, half-expectant look. “He called while we were looking for you. Mentioned something about the data you sent him, a 'possible work-around to the nanites'? But that isn’t important right now. What _is_ important is—”

“Gabriel,” says Jack, instantly.

Ana nods. “Gabriel.”

“Where is he?”

Her dark eyes glitter with humor.

“Recuperating. It took the combined force of both Angela and I to convince him to get some sleep. He was watching over you like a mother duck.” She chortles at the image. “He’s in your bunk.”

“And I’m on bed rest,” Jack says with a sigh. “Damn it.”

Ana pats his knee consolingly. “I’ll bring him in as soon as he’s awake.”

“Thanks, Ana,” Jack says, capturing her hand in his. “Really. Thank you.”

“Anytime,” she says, eyes fond. Then she raises her eyebrows. “Except you’ll never do it again—on pain of death, young man.”

“I’m hardly young anymore,” Jack protests, but at her pointed look, he nods.

Ana rearranges her legs, stretching out at the end of the bed. A comfortable silence suffuses the atmosphere between them until she asks: “Are you ready to talk about what happened?”

Jack thinks about it for a moment.

“Not in detail,” he tells her, “the debrief will have to wait until we're all together, but I’ll do my best to answer what questions you have.”

There must be something in his expression that says otherwise, because she softens.

“It will keep,” she says instead.

Jack just nods, sinking further into the bed, eyes heavy. He shuffles over, motioning for her to sit beside him. She slips into the empty space between Jack and the railing, her body warm against his.

Eyes closed, he asks, “Talk to me?”

Ana chuckles.

“Of course,” she says, and proceeds to talk about everything and nothing. Jack drifts off somewhere between her tumultuous first encounter with McCree’s moonshine and a comparison of the latest gun scopes, lulled by the sound of her voice into a deep, comfortable sleep.

He doesn’t dream.

* 

When next he wakes, Ana is gone and the bed is cold. Jack’s muscles ache in protest as he lifts up and adjusts his glasses, tousled from sleep. The dull glow of the holo-screen above is the only source of light in the otherwise shadowed room. It does little to help him gather his bearings.

A sudden movement by the door and Jack’s snapping to attention. He feels exposed without his visor—though he knows he’s among friends, years of travelling alone in unfamiliar terrain have taught him to be ready for anything, and that knee-jerk reaction is hard to shake.

“Hey,” Jack says, slow and sleep-rough, face softening at the sight of Gabriel standing in the doorway. He’s in his armor—sans coat, gloves and mask—and looks decidedly out of place in Angela’s immaculate sickbay. Jack’s lips twitch. “Get in here before someone sees you.”

Gabriel pushes off the wall to step inside. The automatic door slides shut behind him, but he makes no further bid to come closer, clinging to the fringes of the room, unsure of his welcome. It’s too dark to see his face, but the stilted way he holds himself speaks volumes to Jack.

“Is everything all right?” he asks, browns knitting in concern.

“No,” Gabriel says.

Jack beckons him over.

“Come here.”

He hesitates. “Do you really think that’s wise?”

“Probably not,” Jack admits. “But I still want to see you.”

Gabriel sighs, the tension draining out of him in ropes of black smoke. It billows out his clothes, leaks through his nose and mouth, coiling in the air. “ _Jack_ …” he murmurs, and Jack could kick himself for not seeing this before because Gabriel sounds _wrecked._

His body all but unwinds where it stands—armor and all—until what’s left is a cloud in the rough approximation of a man, writhing like boiled squid ink as it slides through the air toward him. It twines round Jack’s fingers like a concerted surge of wind, quick and light to the touch.

“Gabe,” he utters, feeling equal parts sorrow and amazement. This form is a terrible wonder to behold, a testament to Gabriel's suffering and his strength. No ordinary man could survive such an ordeal and own it so completely as to use it to his advantage, but Jack’s known for some time that Gabriel Reyes is far from ordinary. He wouldn’t know the meaning of the word.

“Come here you stubborn bastard,” he repeats, fondness softening the words.

Oily shadows close in on all sides of him, rippling and bubbling, until he can no longer see what lies beyond. Jack breathes levelly, filled with a strange sense of calm as Gabriel brushes by him, looping round his waist and in his hair. It feels like sitting in the middle of a hurricane, the eye of a storm, perfectly preserved while the world spins in utter chaos—bold strokes of thick, unforgiving black.

Then it’s over and Gabriel manifests before him, body growing depth and detail as the smoke constricts. His skin is warm against Jack’s, solid, hands gripping the railing on either side of him, and before he fully forms he’s swooping in—like the bird of prey for which he is known—to kiss Jack soundly on the mouth.

The lips above Jack’s ripple, then still. The motion awakens something in him, fisting Gabriel’s armor and kissing him back fervently. He ignores the ache in his chest in favor of the bliss coursing up and down his spine, electric and warm, and when they part, Jack stares down at Gabriel’s hands, still gripping the railing, the metal shuddering as he shifts his tight-knuckled grip.

“You’re allowed to touch me,” he tells him. “I won’t break.”

Gabriel leans back to pin him with a heated look, accentuated by the off-red glow of his irises.

“You almost did.”

Jack sighs. “I know. But I’m still here, aren’t I?”

“Barely,” says Gabriel, frowning.

They both ignore the way his fingers shake when he lays them over Jack’s, trapping them against him. A long moment passes where all they do is wait, matching each other breath for breath. Jack loses himself to the thrum of Gabriel’s heart beneath his hand, beating in time with his own.

Then, Gabriel turns his wrist to interlace their fingers, which sends a bolt of heat lancing up Jack’s arm. He watches the sweep of dark lashes against Gabriel’s cheek as he looks down at their joint hands, the warm sepia of his skin a contrast to Jack’s cold, pink undertone.

“What do you want from me?” he asks, and his voice is tired and lost.

“You know my answer,” Jack tells him. “It hasn’t changed.”

Gabriel looks at him, then his eyes dart away.

“I’m not sure I can give you that.”

“I know,” Jack replies, smiling sadly.

He makes a noise of frustration in the back of his throat. “Then why’d you say it?”

Still smiling, he says, “Because it’s the truth.”

Gabriel sighs at the non-answer. He lifts himself off the mattress, hand falling away from Jack, and moves to the window by the bed, dark eyes skating the clifftops and the smattering of stars beyond.

“Here’s my truth,” he says, matter-of-fact. “I can’t stay here. It isn’t my place.”

“It could be,” Jack suggests, not to change his mind as much as informing him of all his options.

Gabriel shakes his head.

“No, it can’t.” He pauses. “At least… not yet. I can’t get the answers I need with Overwatch looking over my shoulder.” The _‘or you’_ goes unspoken. He leans his arms heavily against the windowsill, head bowed. “If there’s anything these past few weeks have taught me, it’s that I know less than nothing about my condition. I was so quick to write it off as a curse that I never bothered to dig deeper.”

He peers over at Jack.

“If I have any hope of getting rid of it, that needs to change.”

Jack hums in agreement. “You’ll need a doctor,” he points out. “A good one.”

“Angela isn’t an option, not after what happened in Zurich,” Gabriel says, in a tone that brooks no argument. He turns, crossing his arms over his chest, and leers at Jack. “Now, I _was_ recommended someone by an old partner of mine—you know the guy, crabby, dramatic, got a bit of that silver fox vibe going for him? I think I'll give his friend a call instead.”

“Good idea,” Jack says, smiling. “You can trust them.”

“No,” Gabriel counters, “but I can trust my partner, and that’s good enough for me.”

They exchange a glance, Jack’s heart lurching at the fondness in Gabriel’s dark brown eyes, the humor that tugs at his lips, unbidden. His leer softens into a smile, just shy of vulnerable, and the sight of it floors Jack, who never thought he’d have this again—the warmth of his regard.

“What then?” he asks, genuinely interested.

Gabriel shrugs. “Sombra hasn’t crawled out of the woodwork yet, which worries me. If I can find her, persuade her to work with me… with Widowmaker on the inside, there’s every chance we can take down Talon before they get to us.”

He glances over at Jack, considering. “When it’s time to make our stand, will you come?”

“I’ll be there,” he promises. “I’ll even bring backup. Talon’s made a lot of enemies, spilled a lot of blood. I have it on good authority that there are people here who’re more than ready to return the favor.”

There’s a wicked edge to Gabriel’s smile when he says, “Sounds like a plan.”

Jack takes a breath, then asks the big question:

“When will you leave?”

As he waits for a response, Jack looks everywhere but Gabriel, unwilling to garner even the slightest bit of hope—or disappointment—from his expression. It’s all for naught, as Gabriel inserts himself into Jack’s space, shifting to lean over him, inescapable. He traces the line of Jack’s jaw, tilting his head up with the tap of a finger, so Jack has no other choice but to look at him.

He tuts softly. “Are you that eager to get rid of me?”

“I think you’ll find it’s quite the opposite,” Jack says, his words a quiet rumble in both their chests.

Gabriel looks away, biting his lip. Jack’s eyes fixate on his mouth, a hot flush lancing through him at the sight. It’s getting harder to resist the urge to chart those lips with his tongue, but he manages it, pulling himself together just in time to hear him say, “I want to give you something.”

He takes his hand and before Jack can think to ask, a cascade of ink-black smoke pours down the length of Gabriel’s arm, swirling around his wrist and the soul-mark carved into his skin. In the cusp of their clasped hands it rises, like a snake charmed by a spell. He tilts Jack’s hand so that the object it creates falls into the center of his palm; the darkness folds in on itself to form a familiar shape.

His fingers close around the edge of Gabriel’s mask, all stark-white kevlar and smooth metal, the hollows of the eyes haunting in the low light of the room. He looks to him in askance.

“What is this?”

“Security,” Gabriel answers. “Yours and mine.” His hand tightens around Jack’s. “I’ll need this to take the fight to Talon, but until then, I’m giving it to you. This way, I know it’s safe and _you_ know I’ll be back.”

Jack watches him closely. “Is that all?”

He shakes his head.

“It’s not just a mask,” he explains. “It's a part of me. Security, yes, but it's also a promise.” He looks up, and it’s like staring at the sun, hot and blinding. Jack burns. “A promise that when I come back, I’ll be ready.”

“For what?” Jack asks.

Gabriel smiles. “Everything.”

*

**END**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> That's a wrap, my lovelies. Here are some parting notes:
> 
> • The scene where Jack and Gabriel are linked together as one entity was inspired by the incredible X-Men: First Class fic [Northern Lights](http://archiveofourown.org/works/588612) by garrideb. I knew when I first embarked on this story that I wanted to write such a scene, and I'm thrilled with the way it turned out. If you're a fan of the X-Men franchise, check out the story. It's very good.  
>   
> • I'd like to take a moment to share my thoughts on the ending. I knew at a very early stage that what most people would call a "happy" ending just wasn't going to fly here—Jack's fight to end the war and Gabriel's vendetta against Talon will always take precedence over their personal desires because that's the kind of men they are; neither of them are ready to abandon their respective missions, both of which are important not only to their growth as people but to the world at large. What they have growing between them demands their full attention and deserves no less. I love hopeful endings, and will always try to provide them where I can. That's what I feel this is and why I've tagged it as such—Gabriel doesn't stay, but he makes a promise to Jack that one day he will. And for now, that's enough. It's enough for Jack, and it's enough for me.  
>   
> • On the topic of a sequel: I have an idea for a follow-up in Gabriel's perspective but I don't know when I'd get the time to write it—with the possibility of a full-time job looming overhead and the promise to write a sequel to Chromatic Abstraction, my free time over the next few months is limited. Let me know what (if anything) you'd most like to read in this 'verse and I'll see what I can do. Never say never, right?  
>   
> • A quick apology for my tardiness in replying to comments left on the previous chapter. I thought it best to upload the final part before I backtrack, as I didn't want you to wait any longer than you already have for this. I'll reply to them as soon as I can.  
>   
> • One last thing before I leave you. Thank you for reading and supporting this story. Your kindness has bettered me, both as a writer and as a person. I can't begin to tell you how much that means to me. From the bottom of my heart, thank you.  
>   
> 


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